the noise of the gun's explosion has left his ears. But I may be
almost equidistant between a group of German and a group of
French guns.

When I have learnt what the guns are and their calibre, and,
perhaps, even their approximate situation on the large-scale Staff
map, I am not much nearer the realisation of them. Actually to find
them might be half a day's work, and when I have found them I
have simply found several pieces of mechanism each hidden in a
kind of hut, functioning quite privately and disconnectedly by the aid
of a few perspiring men. The affair is not like shooting at anything. A
polished missile is shoved into the gun. A horrid bang--the missile
has disappeared, has simply gone. Where it has gone, what it has
done, nobody in the hut seems to care. There is a telephone close
by, but only numbers and formulae--and perhaps an occasional
rebuke--come out of the telephone, in response to which the
perspiring men make minute adjustments in the gun or in the next
missile.

Of the target I am absolutely ignorant, and so are the perspiring
men. I am free to go forth and look for the target. It is pointed out to
me. It may be a building or a group of buildings; it may be
something else. At best, it is nothing but a distant spot on a highly
complex countryside. I see a faint puff of smoke, seemingly as
harmless as a feather momentarily floating. And I think: Can any
reasonable person expect that those men with that noisy
contrivance in the enclosed hut away back shall plant a mass of
metal into that far-off tiny red patch of masonry lost in the vast
landscape? And, even if by chance they do, for what reason has
that particular patch been selected? What influence could its