The infantry is served by a parallel but separate telephone network. Communications between the infantry and the artillery go through a division switchboard. There is a detached, academic atmosphere about Divarty that is lacking in the larger, more bustling Division, and artillerists in general view war with the objectivity of men who seldom see their victims. Divarty is a small, itinerant brain trust which moves quietly with the front-line troops and calls down upon distant Germans the thunder of the division's battalions of artillery. It sets up its command post in a farmhouse or barn within the division area, lays its wires to the battalions, and blacks out windows and chinks through which light might escape.
Mediums can reach it.
He picks up the telephone again, makes a call, and returns to his cribbage game, and outside, in the night, twelve hundred pounds of high explosive scream toward the dark crossroad twenty-five times, at short, irregular intervals. In this particular engagement, however, we simply ran out of crossroads to shoot at. Copyright 1944 by A.J. Liebling.