lodger until you have fully explored what is behind the traverses to the
right and left of you. The delivery of a bomb serves as a very effective
notice of ejectment. The back of the trench is protected by a ridge of
earth commonly known as a parados. My servant, whose vocabulary was
limited, called it a paradox, and was not very wide of the mark.

Somewhere behind the trenches at varying distances are the batteries.
The gunners affect orchards and copses as affording good cover for their
guns, and if none are to be found they improvise them. Hop-poles
trailed with hops or cut saplings will do very well. Usually there is a
delectable garden, which is the peculiar pride of the men. Turf
emplacements are constructed for the six guns, and turfed dug-outs house
the telephone-operator and the gunners. The battery officers are
billeted some way back, usually in a kind of farmhouse, whose chief
decorative feature is a midden-heap; in England it would promptly be the
subject of a closing order by any Public Health authority.

There is nothing more admirable than a field-gun. As a ship answers her
helm or an aeroplane its controls, so does an eighteen-pounder respond
to every turn of her elevating and traversing gear. Watch a gunner
laying his gun on a target he cannot see; observe him switch the gun
round from the aiming point to the target; remark the way in which the
sight clinometer registers the angle of sight and the drum registers the
range; and then ask yourself whether the smartest ship that ever sailed
the high seas could be more docile to a turn of the wheel. With perfect
simplicity did a man in the R.F.A. once say to me, "We feel towards our
gun as a mother feels to her child; we'd sooner lose our lives than our
gun." In that confession of faith you have the whole of the gunner's
creed.