36 
LAND & WATER 
May 25, TO if' 
aeroplane was over and the gunsrould not fire without dis- 
I losing their position. Previous to this a "brief conversa- 
tion liad ensued between the Forward Officer and the 
subaltern at Xhe guns. 
" Tell that bunch up there," said the guns, " that 
we're going to fire some of that rotten ammunition we 
have been buying from their people, just to show them 
how poorly it e.\plodes." 
" Right-o," said the Forward Station. " But rotten 
as it is y' know some of it goes off all right. It would be 
just our luck if the rounds we wanted to show were bad, 
turned out to be good." 
A chuckle came over the wire from the guns, " Leave 
that to me," said the voice which, of course, was in- 
audible to the rest of the party at the Observing Station. 
" I've had a word with Sergeant Dunkley, and — er, 
he knows which rounds are duds. You tell 'em the first 
three shells are United Hyphen make, and the ne.xt 
three are our own." 
The first three rounds were " duds, " and, moreover, 
did not land within fifty to a hundred yards of the spot 
pointed out as the target. This poor shooting, it may be 
mentioned, was the subject of some scathing comment 
from the Forward Officer until the officer at the guns, 
first looking njimd carefully to be sure that Mr. Tubbs 
was not within hearing, asked an apparently irrelevant 
question as to whether if sand were substituted in the 
shell for high-e.xplosive, the ballistics of the shell would 
not be uj>set and the sliooting spoiled. 
" You see," said the I'orward Officer to the group 
of correspondents crowded round the loophole of his 
l(^okout and peeping with periscopes through the broken 
tiles. "Your manufacturers not only stick in rotten 
e.\plosi\'e that hardly gives any burst, but they never 
seem to get the balance of the shell right. You can 
imderstand how erratic that makes the shooting; in 
fact, 3'ou've just seen how erratic. \ow the next three 
rounds will be our own home-made goods. The guns 
will be laid at exactly the same angle and range as for 
those last three rounds but — well, keep your eye glued 
on that building I pointed out. ' 
" Ouph ! " the correspondents gasped and grunted in 
varying tones, but in the same breath as the first shell 
hit the building fair and square ; and the exclamations 
continued as the second and third round followed and 
sent the ruined walls whirling and dissolving under a 
billowing canopy of black smoke, red brick-dust and grey- 
plaster. 
" Bully . . . great stuff . . . some shoot- 
ing . . . and some ginger in those goods," said the 
chorus, and " wouldn't j-ou bust up another target or 
two ? " 
" I could so," said the Forward Officer, " but if we 
stir 'em up too much they're apt to start shelling back. 
I don't suppose you want a brisk bombardment going on 
wliile you tour the forward trench ? " 
" Not any, " said one promptly, but another countered 
as promptly, pointing out that it would make "great 
copy " ; and the party took sides and proceeded to argue 
as to whether the risk was worth the copy or the copy 
worth the risk, until the Staff Officer settled the point 
abruptly. 
" No more," he said. " If any of you are killed, your 
troubles are over, but mine would only be beginning. 
I'm not here to get you shot — to say nothing of my own 
objections to being casualtied." 
" You're not stuffing us," said one correspondent 
dubiously. " I heard that boy of yours back at the 
battery piling the horrors into poor old Tubbs about what 
was to be done with our corpses and so on, but . . . 
'course it's Tubbs' funeral if he's dub enough to fall for 
such stuff, but you might just skin the rest of us as 
gentle as you know how. It's your lay-out and we're 
playing it blind, so give us some sort of a show." 
He could not have taken a better line, and after that 
the party had nothing to complain of in the show they got. 
But back at the Battery Mr. Hesketh P. Tubbs was not 
qxnte so fortunate. 
•1 the first place he ruffled the lieutenant considerably 
by persisting .in talking of " us " as if the Hyphens and 
the Cacnacdonians wore the one people (which they are 
not) ; and in the second he offended still more deeply 
by refusing to swallow the story of an incident (after 
swallowing many impossible ones) which the lieutenant 
vouched for as ha\'mg been seen with his own -eyes. ' 
Lieutenant " Pippy " had been led to tell sojiie of the 
nicknames which he had heard attached to the Cacnac- 
donians. " The Gas-eaters and 'Un-stoppers were 1 
tacked to us after the Wipers show where we stuck out 
the gas attafk and stopped the Hun, y' know. And 
(lethsemane Gardeners and Crossed Canucks is another 
title from the same scrap." 
"Gethsemane Gardeners ? " said^Tubbs inquiringly, and 
on an explanation of what these names indicated he burst 
into loud laughter. " You're surely not trying to unload 
that gulf on me about some of your men having been 
crucified by the Germans. Now I've known a heap of > 
Germans in rny time and I'm not going to believe " 
"I'm not asking you to believe," said Pippy tartly. 
" Only I saw the crucified men myself. But it's not a 
thing we care to talk about, or think about — except when 
we're going into action." 
Tubbs would have argued, but Pippy turned the 
su'jject abruptly. They returned to the cellar and there 
Tubbs had some more Old Rye, and when the whisky 
within him began to talk, which it did presently at length, 
and, to Pippy, rather offensively, Pipp\' at last made some 
excuse and left him. 
" Of all the Bounce-and-Brags I ever met," he said 
disgustedh' a httle later to some passing friends in the 
Pipactocs. " Why to hear him talk you'd think he 
fair ached to eat a Hun for breakfast every morning. 
And what the United Hyphens would only do if they 
came into this war. . . ." And he went on to give 
details of Tubbs' remarks, and of his rheumatism at 
thought of the trenches. 
" Pity he caif t have a chance to show this heroism of 
his," said one of the Pipactoc officers thoughtfully. 
" Now couldn't we fix . . ." And the conversation 
sunk to low tones and smothered laughter. 
When Tubbs strolled out into the shell-smashed street, 
a httle later lie ran across a Pipactoc sergeant who most 
obligingly showed him round the village, and then, as if 
he had quite suddenly remembered it, told Tubbs he 
ought to know just who he was. Tubbs found him most 
difficult to satisfy. He produced all the credentials, 
passports and papers he had about him, one after the 
other, and at last the sergeant, calling another man and 
telling him to wait there with Mr. Tubbs, went off, as 
he said, to put the papers before an officer. Tubbs would 
have protested, but protests were simply ignored, and 
he had to wait a good quarter of an hour kicking his heels 
and getting angrier and angrier. At last his guard 
remarked briefly that he was sick of this waiting and — 
" So long. " He vanished. 
Tubbs, thoroughly angry by this time, set off to find 
his late guide and his papers. He took the direction 
the sergeant had taken, but on turning the first corner was 
halted abruptly by a sentry with fixed bayonet. A 
demand for the countersign and a brief parley ended in 
the appearance of the sergeant of the guard and an 
abrupt invitation to Tubbs — with a bayonet point 
hovering about ' six inches in the ofting— to enter the 
guard-room. An officer was there and he cut short Mr. 
Tubbs' long explanation of who he was by a demand for 
his credentials. Tubbs could only commence a still 
longer explanation about the sergeant who had taken his 
papers. " What regiment was he ? " Tubbs didn't know. 
" What particular Battery was this where you lunched ? " 
Again Tubbs didn't know. " Where is this battery 
exactly ? " Tubbs only knew it was somewhere around 
the village. 
The officer turned from him. " Prisoner— close guard 
— here sergeant." Tubbs found himself hustled 
ignominiously into an inner chamber without a roof, 
his person roughly searched for arms, a guard posted 
over him with fixed bayonet and savage threats of the 
penalties to follow any monkey tricks. 
He stayed there a painfully long two hours, the first 
part of which were spent in pleadings with and threats 
to the guard, and the latter part in dead silence after a 
curt intimation that " if he didn't shut his yap "... 
a significant motion of the bayonet finishing the sentence. 
Up to' now he had not had the faintest doubt but that 
he would be released and apologised to as soon as en- 
quiries had been made, and he extracted what comfort 
he could from antiri])ations of how hot he could make 
things for the fools who had got him in this pickle. But a 
