THE Gunnery Officer was an enthusiast on his work—in fact, if you took the Squadron’s word for it, he went past that and was an utter crank on machine-guns and everything connected with them. They admitted all the benefits of this enthusiasm, the excellent state in which their guns were always to be found, the fact that in air fighting they probably had fewer stoppages and gun troubles than any other Squadron at the Front; but on the other hand they protested that there was a time and place for everything, and that you could always have too much of a good thing. It was bad enough to have “Guns” himself cranky on the subject, but when he infected the Recording Officer with his craze, it was time to kick. “Guns” usually had some of the mechanism of his pets in his pockets, and he and the R.O. could be seen in the ante-room fingering these over, gloating over them or discussing some technical points. They had to be made to sit apart at mess because the gun-talk never ceased so long as they were together, and the two at the same table were enough to bring any real game of Bridge or Whist to utter confusion. As one of their partners said, “I never know whether Guns is declaring No Trumps or tracer bullets or Hearts or ring sights. If you ask what the score is, he starts in to reel off the figures of the Squadron’s last shooting test; he’ll fidget to finish the most exciting rubber you ever met and get away to his beastly armoury to pull the innards out of some inoffensive Lewis. He’s hopeless.” Guns and the R.O. between them apparently came to a conclusion that we were chucking the war away because we didn’t concentrate enough on machine-gun frightfulness. They’d have washed out the whole artillery probably, Archies included, if they’d been asked, and given every man a machine-gun on his shoulder and a machine-pistol in his hip-pocket. They wasted a morning and an appalling number of rounds satisfying themselves that machine-guns would cut away barbed-wire entanglements, stealing a roll of wire from some unsuspecting Engineers’ dump, erecting a sample entanglement in the quarry, and pelting it with bullets. And they called the C.O. “narrow-minded” when he made a fuss about the number of rounds they’d used, and reminded them barbed wire didn’t figure in air fighting. They tramped miles across country, one carrying a Vickers and the other a Lewis, to settle some argument about how far or how fast a man could hump the guns; they invented fakements enough to keep a private branch of the Patents Office working overtime logging them up. It sounds crazy, but then, as the Squadron protested, they, Guns especially, were crazy, and that’s all there was to it.