"Just like the Crystal Palace on a benefit night!" observed his guide
admiringly, as the landscape was lit up with a white glare. "Now you
can see your position beautifully. You can fire obliquely in this
direction, and then do a first-class enfilade if the trenches get
rushed."
"I see," said Ayling, surveying the position with real interest.
He was beginning to enjoy selecting gun-emplacements which really
mattered. It was a change from nine months of "eye-wash."
When the German star-shell had spent itself they crossed the road, to
the rear of the redoubt, and marked the other two emplacements--in
comparative safety now.
"The only trouble about this place," said Ayling, as he surveyed the
last position, "is that my fire will be masked by that house with the
clump of trees beside it."
The Engineer produced a small note-book, and wrote in it by the light
of a convenient star-shell.
"Right-o!" he said. "I'll have the whole caboodle pushed over for you
by to-morrow night. Anything else?"
Ayling began to enjoy himself. After you have spent nine months in an
unprofitable attempt to combine practical machine-gun tactics with a
scrupulous respect for private property, the realisation that you may
now gratify your destructive instincts to the full comes as a welcome
and luxurious shock.
"Thanks," he said. "You might flatten out that haystack, too.
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