from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. In ordnance, an armored shield attached to and turning with the top-carriage of a gun: designed to protect the mechanism and the gun's crew.
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Sometimes a gun-shield had burst a shell, which if there had been no such attempt at protection would perhaps have passed harmlessly over the heads of the gunners.
They took up their position on the leeward side of the after 7. 5-inch gun-shield.
The crack shot of No. 2 Platoon raised his rifle, and the sergeant on the seat behind the gun-shield reeled round and dropped, Hawke's second bullet sending the man who was feeding the breech two feet into the air.
With every man in the gun's crew round him dead or dying, and with the gun-shield shot away, he stood there, under a terrific fire, mortally wounded, with the receivers at his ears, reporting exactly what had happened to everyone except himself, and calmly waiting for orders how to carry on.
On the night of July 8 the French began a bombardment which was followed by an infantry charge which forced its way through five lines of trenches and gained the redoubt on the top of the hill, in spite of its corrugated iron and gun-shield defenses to which had been added logs and tree trunks.
This is no less true of the man who planned the ships and of the other men, whether in the government service or in private employment, who built them, from the head of the great business concern which put up an armor-plate factory down to the iron-worker who conscientiously and skilfully did his part on gun-shield or gun.