“Gunnery is navigation, dead reckoning, with the spotting observer the sun by which you correct your reckoning,” said one of the artillery officers.
Firing enough one had seen--landscape bathed in smoke and dust and reverberating with explosions; but all as a spectacle from the orchestra seat, not too close at hand for comfort. This time I was to see the guns fire and then I was to see the results of the firing in detail. Both can rarely be seen at the same time. It was not show firing, this that we watched from an observing station, but part of the day’s work for the guns and the general. First; the map; “here and there,” as an officer’s finger pointed; and then one looked across the fields, green and brown and golden with summer crops.
Item I. The Germans were fortifying a certain point on a certain farm. We were going to put some “heavy stuff” in there and some “light stuff,” too. The burst of our shells could be located in relation to a certain tree.
Item II. Our planes thought that the Germans had a wireless station in a certain building. “Heavy stuff” exclusively for this.
No enemy’s wireless station ought to be enjoying serene summer weather without interruption; and no German working party ought to be allowed to build redoubts within range of our guns without a break in the monotony of their drudgery.
Six lyddites were the order for the wireless station; six high explosives which burst on contact and make a hole in the earth large enough for a grave for the Kaiser and all his field marshals. Frequently, not only the number of shells to be fired, but also the intervals between them is given by the artillery commander, as a part of his plan in his understanding of the object to be accomplished; and it is quite clear that the system is the same with the Germans.
One side no sooner develops an idea than the other adopts it. By the effect of the enemy’s shells you judge what the effect of yours must be. Months of experience have done away with all theory and practice has become much the same with either adversary. For example, let a German or a British airman be winged by anti-aircraft gun-fire and the enemy’s guns instantly loosen up on the point over his own lines, if he regains them, where he is seen to fall. All the soldiers in the neighbourhood are expected to run to his assistance; and, at any rate, you may kill a trained aviator, whose life is a valuable asset on one side of the ledger and whose death an asset on the other. There is no sentiment left in war, you see. It is all killing and avoiding being killed.