Certain soldiers

Usage examples of gunners.

The gunners had charged the gaudy barrel with a double load of powder and now they rammed two cannonballs down the blackened gullet.

The gunners leaped off the limber, but before they could detach the spare wheel, the ox team bolted.

The gunners ran to head the oxen off, but then a second team panicked.

The men vanished in the high stalks, leaving nothing behind but a scatter of embarrassed officers and, astonishingly, the two panicked gun teams which had inexplicably stopped short of the millet and now waited patiently for the gunners to catch them.

He kept telling them to put their cannon between the regiments, so that the gunners could slant their fire across the face of the infantry, but Indian commanders reckoned that the sight of guns directly in front heartened their men.

He had thirty-eight cannon, all of them heavier than anything the British had yet deployed, and his gunners were as well trained as any in the world.

The vision of eagles had persuaded him that he would see victory, and he believed the gunners would make that victory.

Some screamed overhead and a few bounced over the line, but the enemy gunners were good, and they were lowering their cannon barrels so that the round shot struck the ground well ahead of the redcoat line and, by the time the missile reached the target, it had bounced a dozen times and so struck at waist height or below.

The advancing line still had half a mile to go and, while the six-pounders could fire at that distance, the gunners must have decided to get really close so that their shots could not miss.

The gunners were working in shirtsleeves, swabbing, ramming, then ducking aside as the guns pitched back again Only the gun commanders most of them sergeants, seemed to look at the enemy, and then only when they were checking the alignment of the cannon.

The other gunners fetched shot and powder, sometimes heaved on a handspike or pushed on the wheels as the gun was re laid then swabbed and loaded again.

The enemy gun line was at the crest of the low rise, but the Mahratta gunners dared not fire because the remnants of the Lions of Allah were between them and the redcoats.

The gunners hesitated for a few seconds, then decided the day was lost and fled.

Some began rifling the limbers where gunners stored food and valuables.

He had stopped to watch the gunners loading one of the captured cannon, a great brute that looked to take a ball of twenty or more pounds.