"As a matter of fact," says a commandant, "anybody--or,
rather, everybody did. The general idea is after such-and-such
system, the patent of which had expired, and we improved
it; the breech action, with slight modification, is somebody
else's; the sighting is perhaps a little special; and so is
the traversing, but, at bottom, it is only an assembly of
variations and arrangements."
That, of course, is all that Shakespeare ever got out of the
alphabet. The French Artillery make their own guns as he made
his plays. It is just as simple as that.
"There is nothing going on for the moment; it's too misty,"
said the Commandant. (I fancy that the Boche, being, as a
rule methodical, amateurs are introduced to batteries in the
Boche's intervals. At least, there are hours healthy and
unhealthy which vary with each position.) "But," the
Commandant reflected a moment, "there is a place--and a
distance. Let us say . . . " He gave a range.
The gun-servers stood back with the bored contempt of the
professional for the layman who intrudes on his mysteries.
Other civilians had come that way before--had seen, and
grinned, and complimented and gone their way, leaving the
gunners high up on the bleak hillside to grill or mildew or
freeze for weeks and months. Then she spoke. Her voice was
higher pitched, it seemed, than ours--with a more shrewish
tang to the speeding shell. Her recoil was as swift and as
graceful as the shrug of a French-woman's shoulders; the empty
case leaped forth and clanged against the trail; the tops of
two or three pines fifty yards away nodded knowingly to each
other, though there was no wind.
"They'll be bothered down below to know the meaning of our
single shot. We don't give them one dose at a time as a
rule," somebody laughed.
We waited in the fragrant silence. Nothing came back from the
mist that clogged the lower grounds, though no shell of this
war was ever launched with more earnest prayers that it might
do hurt.
Then they talked about the lives of guns; what number of
rounds some will stand and others will not; how soon one can
make two good guns out of three spoilt ones, and what crazy
luck sometimes goes with a single shot or a blind salvo.