“Barrage, sir!—barrage! Splashing thousands of bullets all over a country scattered with camps. Are you mad, sir? Air barrage! Go’ bless your eyes, man, d’you think you’re in London that you must go filling the sky with barrages and bullets and waking me and every other man within miles with your cursed row. Suppose you had shot someone—suppose you have shot someone. Blank blank your air barrage. You’d better go back to England, where you’ll be in the fashion with your air barrages and anti-aircraft. Am I to be driven from my bed on a filthy cold night to ...” he spluttered explosively and stopped short. If the Division heard the details of his share in the incident, had the chance to picture him racing for the dug-out, sitting shivering in scanty night attire, and add to the picture as they’d certainly do, the joke would easily outlive the war and him. “That will do, sir,” he said after a brief pause, “I’ll have a word with your Major and leave him to deal with you.”
Guns came out with his head hanging, to join the pale-cheeked R.O. and escape with him.
Ten minutes after a message came to him that the General wanted him in the C.O.’s office, and Guns groaned and went back to hear his sentence, estimating it at anything between “shot at dawn” and cashiered, broke, and sent out of the Service.
Now, what the C.O. had said in those ten minutes nobody ever knew, but Guns found a totally different kind of General awaiting him.
“Come in,” he said, and after a pause a twinkle came in his eye as he looked at the dejected, hangdog air of the culprit. “H-m-m! You can thank your C.O. and the excellent character he gives you, sir, for my agreeing to drop this matter. I think you realise your offence and won’t repeat it. Zeal and keenness is always commendable; but please temper it with discretion. I am glad to know of any officer keen on his work as I hear you are; but I cannot allow the matter to pass entirely without punishment....” (Guns braced himself with a mental “Now for it.”) “... So I order you to parade at my Headquarters at 7.30 to-night, and have dinner with me.” He paused, said, “That’ll do, sir,” very abruptly, and Guns emerged in a somewhat dazed frame of mind.
He said, after the dinner, that the punishment was much worse than it sounded. “Roasting! I never had such a dose of chaffing in my life. Those red-tabbed blighters ... and they were all so infernally polite with it ... it was just beastly—all except the General. My Lord, he’s a man, a proper white man, a real brick. And he was as keen to know all about machine-guns as I am myself.”
“Well, you taught him something about them—especially about barrages and the result of indirect fire,” said the Mess, and, “Are you going to barrage the next Huns?”
But on his next barrage plans, Guns in the first place—the very first and preliminary place—used a map, many diagrams, and endless pages of notebooks in calculations on where his bullets would come down.