"What's happened?" I asked, not having heard the howl of a shell.
"Nothing," said the boy, "except touching wood. The captain spoke too
loudly."
We went out to the guns which were to do a little shooting, and found
them camouflaged from aerial eyes in the grim desolation of the
battlefield, all white after a morning's snowstorm, except where the
broken walls of distant farmhouses and the windmills on Kemmel Hill
showed black as ink.
The gunners could not see their target, which had been given to them
through the telephone, but they knew it by the figures giving the
angle of fire.
"It's a pumping-party in a waterlogged trench," said a bright-eyed boy
by my side (he was one of the rising hopes of Fleet Street before he
became a gunner officer in Flanders). "With any luck we shall get 'em
in the neck, and I like to hear the Germans squeal. . . And my gun's
ready first, as usual."
The officer commanding shouted through a tin megaphone, and the
battery fired, each gun following its brother at a second interval,
with the staccato shock of a field-piece, which is more painful than
the dull roar of a "heavy.
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