The spotters are all over the hills, the
complicated and delicate listening posts which can hear a plane miles away, and
the spotters are girls. When a strange ship is heard, its position is phoned to
the plotters of position, and the plotters are girls, too. The sighters are
girls. Only the gunners who load and turn the gun itself are men. It is an
amazing institution, the mixed battery, something unique in the history of
armies.
The barracks are nearby, one for the girls and
another for the men. The eating hall is common, the recreation room is common,
and the work is common.
Twenty-four hours a day the crews are on duty.
They can do what they want within a certain distance from the gun. The girls
read and wash their clothing, sew and cook. The kitchen, a temporary affair, is
built of kerosene tins filled with sand laid like bricks. The new kitchen is
just now being built.
The countryside is quiet. The guns are silent.
Suddenly the siren howls. Buildings that are hidden in camouflage belch people,
young men and women. They pour out, running like mad. The siren has not been
going for thirty seconds when the run is over, the gun is manned, the target
spotted. In the control room under ground the instruments have found their
target. A girl has fixed it. The numbers have been transmitted and the ugly
barrels whirled. Above ground, in a concrete box, a girl speaks into a
telephone. “Fire,” she says quietly. The hillside rocks with the explosion of
the battery. The field grass shakes and the red poppies shudder in the blast.
New orders come up from below and the girl says, “Fire.”
The process is machine-like, exact. There is no
waste movement and no nonsense. These girls seem to be natural soldiers. They are
soldiers, too. They resent above anything being treated like women when they
are near the guns. Their work is hard and constant. Sometimes they are alerted
to the guns thirty times in a day and a night. They may fire on a marauder ten
times in that period. They have been bombed and strafed, and there is no record
of any girl flinching.
The commander is very proud of them. He is
fiercely affectionate toward his battery. He says a little bitterly, “All
right, why don’t you ask about the problem of morals? Everyone wants to know
about that. I’ll tell you—there is no problem.”
He tells about the customs that have come into
being in this battery, a set of customs which grew automatically. The men and
the women sing together, dance together, and, let any one of the women be
insulted, and he has the whole battery on his neck. But when a girl walks out
in the evening, it is not with one of the battery men, nor do the men take the
girls to the movies. There have been no engagements and no marriages between
members of the battery. Some instinct among the people themselves has told them
trouble would result. These things are not a matter of orders but of custom.
