just outside the window. "That little fellow is a couple of hundred
yards away, in the corner of the wood. The Boche has been groping
about there for a battery for the last two days."

"Is the battery there?" inquired a voice.

"No; it is farther east. But there is a Gunner's Mess about two
hundred yards from here, in that house which you passed on the way
up."

"Oh!" observed X Brigade.

Gunners are peculiar people. When professionally engaged, no men could
be more retiring. They screen their operations from the public gaze
with the utmost severity, shrouding batteries in screens of foliage
and other rustic disguises. If a layman strays anywhere near one of
these arboreal retreats, a gunner thrusts out a visage enflamed with
righteous wrath, and curses him for giving the position away. But in
his hours of relaxation the gunner is a different being. He billets
himself in a house with plenty of windows: he illuminates all these by
night, and hangs washing therefrom by day. When inclined for exercise,
he goes for a promenade across an open space labelled--"Not to be used
by troops by daylight." Therefore, despite his technical excellence
and superb courage, he is an uncomfortable neighbour for
establishments like Hush Hall.

In this respect he offers a curious contrast to the Sapper. Off duty,
the Sapper is the most unobtrusive of men--a cave-man, in fact. He
burrows deep into the earth, or the side of a hill, and having secured
the roof of this cavern against direct hits by ingenious contrivances