Ten years ago it would have seemed good shooting.  It was not very good in the twelfth month of the war; for war beats the target range in developing accuracy.  At five or six or seven or eight thousand yards’ range the shells were bursting thirty or forty yards away from where they should.

No, not very good; the general murmured as much.  He did not need to say so aloud to the artillery officer responsible for that shooting, who was in touch with his batteries by wire.  The officer knew it.  He was the high-strung, ambitious sort.  You had better not become a gunner unless you are.  Any “good-enough” temperament is ruled off wasting munitions.  Red was creeping through the tan from his throat to the roots of his hair.  To have this happen in the presence of that veteran general, after all his efforts to try to remedy the error in those guns!

But the general was quite human.  He was not the “strafing” kind.

“I know those guns have an error!” he said, as he put his hand on the officer’s arm.  That was all; and that was a good deal to the officer.  Evidently, the general not only knew guns; he knew men.  The officer had suffered admonition enough from his own injured pride.

Besides, what we did to the supposed wireless station ought to keep any general from being downhearted.  Neither guns, nor the powder which sent the big shells on their errand, nor the calculations of the gunners, nor their adjustment of the gadgets, had any error.  With the first one, a great burst of the black smoke of deadly lyddite rose from the target.  “Right on!”

And again and again—­right on!  The ugly, spreading, low-hanging, dense cloud was renewed from its heart by successive bursts in the same place.  If the aeroplane’s conclusions were right, that wireless station must be very much wireless, now.  The only safe discount for the life insurance of the operators was one hundred per cent.

“Here, they are firing more than six!” said the general.  “It’s always hard to hold these gunners down when they are on the target like that.”

He spoke as if it would have been difficult for him to resist the temptation himself.  The wireless station got two extra shells for full measure.  Perhaps those two were waste; perhaps the first two had been enough.  Conservation of shells has become a first principle of the artillerists’ duty.  The number fired by either side in the course of the routine of an average so-called peaceful day is surprising.  Economy would be easier if it were harder to slip a shell into a gun-breech.  The men in the trenches are always calling for shells.  They want a tree or a house which is the hiding-place of a sniper knocked down.  The men at the guns would be glad to accommodate them, but the say as to that is with commanders who know the situation.

“The Boches will be coming back at us soon, you will see!” said one of the officers who was at our observation post.  “They always do.  The other day they chose this particular spot for their target”—­which was a good reason why they would not this time, an optimist thought.