glancing obliquely at each other, stood on a tripod, and a graduated sequence of flashes came and went, under the hands of the signallers, with the velocity of light itself.  A few yards behind us on the crest of the hill stood a windmill, its great sails motionless as though it were a brig becalmed and waiting for a wind, and astride one arm, like a sailor on a yard, a carpenter was busy, with his mouth full of nails.  The tapping of his hammer and the song of the lark were the only sounds that broke the warm stillness of the April day.  A great plain stretched away at our feet, and in the fields below women were stooping forward over their hoes.

The white towers of Ypres gleamed ghostlike in the distant haze.  The city had the wistful fragility of some beautiful mirage, and looking at it across the pleasant landscape I thought of the Pilgrim’s vision of the Golden City shining in the sun beyond the Land of Beulah.  Two or three miles away on our right the ground rose gently to a range of low wooded hills, and on their bare green slopes brown furrows showed up like a cicatrice.  They were the German trenches.  On the crest of the ridge a white house peeped out between the trees.  That house seemed an object of peculiar interest to the battery-major at my side.  He was stooping behind the “Director” with his eye to the sights as though he was focussing the distant object for a photograph.  He fixed the outer clamp, unscrewed the inner clamp, and having got his sights on the house, he reversed the process and swung round the sights to bear on a little copse to our left.  “One hundred and five,” he said meditatively as he found the angle.  The N.C.O. took up the range-finder and measured the distances first to the house, then to the copse.  The major took up an adjustable triangle, and with a movement of thumb and forefinger converted it into the figure of an irregular “X.”  As he read off the battery angle on the “Plotter” the N.C.O. communicated it and the elevation to the telephone operator, who in turn communicated it to the battery in the copse.  “Battery angle seventy.  Range four thousand.”  Gunners are a laconic people, and their language is as economical of words as a proposition in Euclid; their sentences resemble those Oriental languages in which the verb is regarded as a superfluous impertinence.  Language is to them a visual and symbolical thing in which angles and distances are predicated of churches, trees, and four-storied houses.  Now in the copse on our left six field-guns were cunningly concealed, and even as the telephone operator spoke the dial-sights of those six guns were being screwed round and the elevating gear adjusted till they and the range-drum recorded the results of the major’s meditations upon the hill.  Then the guns in the copse spoke, and the air was sibilant with their speech.  A little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand arose above the roof of the white house on the ridge.  Our battery had found its mark.