3

The shell factory and the explosives shed stand level with the drill
yard as the real first stage in one of the two essential _punches_ in
modern war. When one meets the shell again it is being unloaded from the
railway truck into an ammunition dump. And here the work of control is
much more the work of a good traffic manager than of the old-fashioned
soldier.

The dump I best remember I visited on a wet and windy day. Over a great
space of ground the sidings of the rail-head spread, the normal gauge
rail-head spread out like a fan and interdigitated with the narrow gauge
lines that go up practically to the guns. And also at the sides camions
were loading, and an officer from the Midi in charge of one of these was
being dramatically indignant at five minutes' delay. Between these
two sets of lines, shells were piled of all sizes, I should think some
hundreds of thousands of shells altogether, wet and shining in the rain.
French reservists, soldiers from Madagascar, and some Senegalese were
busy at different points loading and unloading the precious freights.
A little way from me were despondent-looking German prisoners handling
timber. All this dump was no more than an eddy as it were in the path
of the shell from its birth from the steel bars near Paris to the
accomplishment of its destiny in the destruction or capture of more
Germans.

And next the visitor meets the shell coming up upon a little trolley to
the gun. He sees the gunners, as drilled and precise as the men he saw
at the forges, swing out the breech block and run the shell, which
has met and combined with its detonators and various other industrial
products since it left the main dump, into the gun. The breech