SNIPING
I
The snow was coming down in big white flakes, whirling and dancing
against a grey sky. I shivered as I looked out from the top of the
dug-out steps in Maple Redoubt. It was half-past seven, a good hour
since the snipers had reported to me before going to their posts. It
was quite dark then, for a sniper must always be up on his post a good
hour before dawn to catch the enemy working a few minutes too late.
It is so easy to miss those first faint glimmerings of twilight when
you are just finishing off an interesting piece of wiring in “No Man’s
Land.” I speak from experience. For so a sniper got me.
“U--u--u--gh,” I shuddered, “it’s no good keeping the men on in this”;
so, putting my whiskey-bottle full of rum in my haversack, I set off
up Old Kent Road to visit my posts and withdraw the men _pro tem_.
I expected to find the fellows unutterably cold, shrivelled up, and
bored. To my surprise, at No. 1 post Thomas and Everton were in a state
of huge excitement, eyes glowing, and faces full of life. There seemed
to be a great rivalry, too, for the possession of the rifle. For the
snipers always worked in pairs: a man cannot gaze out at the opposing
lines with acute interest for more than about half an hour on end; so
I used to work them by pairs, and give them shifts according to the
weather. In summer you could put a pair on for four hours, and they
would work well, taking half-hour shifts; but in cold weather two hours
was quite enough.
“We’ve got them, sir,” from 75 Thomas; “they was working in the trench
over there--by all them blue sand-bags, sir--four of them, sir----”
“Yes, and I saw him throw up his arms, sir,” put in Everton, excited
for the first time I have ever seen him, and trying to push Thomas out
of the box, and have another look. But Thomas would not be pushed.
“Splendid,” I said: “by Jove, that’s good work. Can I see?” But it
was snowing hard, and I could see very little. I tried the telescope.
“Put it right up to your eye, sir,” said Thomas, forgetting that I had
myself taught him this in billets as he vainly tried to see through it
holding it about four inches from his face, and declaring that he could
see everything just as well with his own eyes!
“Yes, I think I see where you mean,” said I; “up by that sand-bag dump.
There’s a mine-shaft there, and they were probably some of their R.E.’s
piling up sand-bags, or emptying them out. I believe that is what they
usually do now, fill the sand-bags below in their galleries, bring them
up, empty them, and use the same ones again.”
Thomas and Everton gaped at this. It had not occurred to them to
consider that the Boche had R.E.’s. They were of the unimaginative
class of snipers, who “saw, did, and reported,” and on the whole I
preferred them to those who saw, and immediately “concluded.” For their
conclusions were usually wrong. To men like Thomas I was, I think,
looked upon as one who had some slightly supernatural knowledge of
the German lines; he did not realise that by careful compass-bearings
I knew the exact ground visible from his post, and that my map of
the German lines, showing every trench as revealed by aeroplane
photographs, was accurate to a yard. He was like a retriever, who keeps
to heel, noses out his bird with unerring skill, and brings it in with
the softest of mouths; yet the cunning and strategy he leaves to his
master, who is decidedly his inferior in nose and mouth. So 75 Thomas
could see and shoot far better than I; but it was I who thought out the
strategy of the shoot.
“Well,” said I, as I doled out a rather more liberal rum ration than
usual, “that’s d---- good work, anyway. Two you got, you say? Not sure
about the second? Anyway you had two good shots, and remember what
I told you, a sniper only shoots to kill. So two it’s going to be,
anyhow.” (They both grinned at this, which was the nearest they could
get to a wink.) “I’m very pleased about it. Now it’s not much good
staying up here in this thick snow, so you can go off till I send word
to your dug-out for you to go on again.”
I turned to go away, thinking that the other posts, rumless, and in all
probability quarryless, must be in a state of exasperating coldness by
now. But Thomas and Everton did not move. There was something wanted.
“Well, what is it?”
“Please sir, can we stay on here a bit? P’raps one of those R.E.
fellows may come back for something.”
“Good heavens, yes,” I said, “stay on as long as you like,” and smiled
as I made off to my other posts. (Later I used to get the snipers to
report to me coming off their posts, and get their rum ration then;
as I found it gave a bad appearance and damaged the reputation of the
snipers when people saw me going about with the nose of a bottle of
“O.V.H.” whiskey sticking out of my haversack!) There, as I expected,
I found the men blue and bored.
“You can’t see nothing to-day, sir, at all,” was the sentence with
which I was immediately greeted. Even the rum seemed to inspire very
little outward enthusiasm.
“You can go off to your dug-outs till I send for you,” I replied,
carefully corking the bottle and not looking at them while I spoke: “if
you like,” I added after a pause, looking up. But the post was empty.
That afternoon I was up on No. 1 post, with a sniper who was new to
the work. It was still freezing, but the snow-clouds had cleared
right away, and the wind had dropped. There was a tingle in the air;
everything was as still as death; the sun was shining from a very
blue sky, and throwing longer and longer shadows in the snow as the
afternoon wore on. It was a valuable afternoon, the enemy’s wire
showing up very clearly against the white ground, and I was showing the
new sniper how to search the trench systematically from left to right,
noting the exact position of anything that looked like a loophole,
or steel-plate, and especially the thickness of the wire, what kind,
whether it was grey and new, or rusty-red and old; whether there were
any gaps in it, and where. All these things a sniper should note every
morning when he comes on to his post. Gaps are important, as patrols
must come out through gaps, and the Lewis gunners should know these,
and be ready to fire at them if a patrol is heard thereabouts in No
Man’s Land. Similarly, old gaps closed up must be reported.
It was very still. “Has the war stopped?” one felt inclined to ask. No,
there is the sound of shells exploding far away on the right somewhere;
in the French lines it must be, somewhere about Frise. Then a “phut”
from just opposite, and a long whining “we’oo--we’oo--we’oo--we’-oo
... bzung,” and a rifle-grenade burst with a snarl about a hundred
yards behind. Then another, and another, and another. “They’re trying
for Trafalgar Square,” said I. No. 1 post was a little to the right
of the top of 76 Street. I waited. There were no more. It was just
about touch and go whether we replied. If they went on up to about a
dozen, the chances were that the bombing-corporal in charge of our
rifle-grenade battery would rouse himself, and loose off twenty in
retaliation. But, no. Perhaps the German had repented him of the evil
of desecrating the peace of such an afternoon; or perhaps he was just
ranging, and had an observer away on the flank somewhere to watch the
effect of his shooting. Anyway he did not fire again, and the afternoon
slumber was resumed, till the evening “strafe” came on in due course.
“I can see something over on the left, sir. It is a man’s head, sir!
Look!”
I looked. Yes!
“No,” I almost shouted. “It’s a dummy head. Just have a look. And
don’t, whatever you do, fire.”
Sure enough, a cardboard head appeared over the front parapet opposite,
with a grey cap on. Slowly it disappeared. Without the telescope it
would have been next to impossible to see it was not a man. Again it
appeared, then slowly sank out of view. It was well away on the left,
just in front of where the “R.E.’s” had been hit at dawn. For this
post was well-sited, having an oblique field of vision, as all good
sniping-posts should. That is to say, they should be sited something
like this:
[Illustration]
The ideal is to have all your posts in the supports, and _not_ in the
front line, and at about three hundred yards from the enemy front
line. Of course if the ground slopes _away_ behind you, you cannot get
positions in the supports unless there are buildings to make posts in.
By getting an _oblique_ view, you gain two advantages:
(_a_) If A gets a shot at C, C’s friends look out for “that d----d
sniper opposite,” and look in the direction of B, who is carefully
concealed from direct view.
(_b_) A’s loophole is invisible from direct observation by D, as it is
pointing slantwise at C.
All this I now explained to my new sniper.
“But why not smash up his old dummy, sir? Might put the wind up the
fellow working it.”
“No,” I explained. “Look at the paper again. (I had drawn it out for
him, as I have on the previous page.) Thomas shot at those R.E.’s this
morning, don’t you see? He was here (B), and they’re at D. Now they’re
trying to find _you_, or the man who shot their pal; and you can bet
anything you like they’ve got a man watching either at C or right
away on the left to spot you if you fire at the dummy. No. Lie doggo,
and see if you can spot that man on the flank. He’s probably got a
periscope.”
“Can’t see him, sir,” at length.
“No. Never mind; he’s probably far too well concealed. Always remember
the Boche is as clever as you, and sometimes cleverer.”
“Ah, but he wants me to shoot, sir, and I won’t,” came the cheery
answer. “What about smashing up his old dummy?” I reminded him. His
face fell. He had forgotten his old un-sniper-like self already. “Never
mind,” said I. “Now when Thomas and Everton come up here, mind you
tell them all about the dummy; and tell Thomas from me that the Boche
doesn’t spend his time dummy-wagging for nothing. Probably it was an
R.E. sergeant.”
II
“Swis-s-sh--báng. Swis-s-sh--báng.”
“That settles it,” said I, as I scrambled hastily down into the trench,
preceded by the sniper I had with me that day as orderly. I more or
less pushed him along for ten yards--then halted; we faced each other
both very much out of breath and “blowy.” The whole place was reeking
with the smell of powder, and the air full of sand-bag fluff.
“That settles it,” I repeated: “I always thought that was a rotten
post; and I object to being whizz-banged. ‘A sniper’s job is to see and
not be seen.’ Isn’t that right, Morris?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Morris, adding with a sad lack of humour “They must
have seen us, sir!”
“Exactly: they did. And they weren’t very far off hitting one of us
into the bargain. As I say, that settles it. We’ll leave that post for
ever and ever; and to-night we’ll build a new one that they _won’t_
see.”
At ten o’clock that night we were well at work. Just on the one hundred
metre contour line there was a small quarry, at the west end of which
had been the too conspicuous post where the Boche had spotted us. Every
loophole must by its very nature be “spottable”; but when the natural
ground is so little disturbed that it looks exactly the same as it
did before the post was made, then indeed this “spottability” is so
much reduced that it verges on invisibility. So, leaving the old post
exactly as before, we were building a new one about twenty yards to the
west of it.
There was a disused support trench running west from the Quarry,
and this suited my purpose admirably. It ran just along the crest
of the hill, and commanded even a better view of Fricourt than the
Quarry itself. Moreover, there was enough earth thrown up in front
of the trench to enable us to fix in the steel-plate (at an angle of
45°: this increases its impenetrability) on ground level, without
the top protruding above the top of the earth. The soil in front was
not touched at all until the plate was fixed in, and then enough
was carefully scooped away from the front of the actual loophole to
secure a fair field of view. The earth in front of the loophole is
then exactly like a castle wall, with a splay window. If you think
of a Norman castle you will know exactly what I mean. The loophole
represents the inch-wide aperture in the inner side of the splay.
Similarly an embrasure is built behind the loophole, with room for one
man to stand and fire, and the second man to sit by him. A rainproof
shelter of corrugated iron is placed over this embrasure, and covered
over with earth; this prevents it being spotted by aeroplane; also it
makes the place habitable in the rain. Here is a section of a typical
sniper’s post:
[Illustration]
“Click, click click” went the pick into the chalk, cutting room for the
embrasure; there was a tinny sound as some of the loose surface soil
came away with a spurt, spilling on to the two sheets of corrugated
iron waiting to go on to the roof. Added to this were the few quiet
whispers, such as “Where’s that sand-bag?” or “Is this low enough,
sir?”, and the heavy breathing of Private Evans as he returned from the
Quarry after emptying his sand-bag. For all the chalk cut away had to
be carried to the Quarry and emptied there; new earth on the top there
would not give any clue to those gentlemen in Fricourt Wood who put the
smell of powder in my nostrils a few hours back.
It was a darkish night, but not so dark but what you could see the top
of the trench. There are very few nights when the sky does not show
lighter than the trench-sides. There are a few, though, especially when
it is raining; and they are bad, very bad. But that night I could just
distinguish the outline of the big crater-top, half-right, and follow
the near skyline along the German parapet down into Fricourt valley.
I was gazing down into that silent blackness, when a machine-gun
started popping; I could see the flashes very clearly from my position.
Somewhere in Fricourt they must be.
Meanwhile the post was nearly finished; the corrugated iron was being
fixed to the wooden upright, and Jones was on the parapet sprinkling
earth over it. The others were deepening the trench from the Quarry to
the post.
“That’s the machine-gun that goes every night, sir,” said Jones.
“Enfilading, that’s what it is.”
“Pop--pop--pop,” answered the machine-gun.
“Look here, Jones,” said I. “You know No. 5 post, opposite Aeroplane
Trench?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Well, go down there, and see if you can see the flashes from there;
and if you can, mark it down. See?”
“Yes, sir!” and he had his equipment on in no time, and was starting
off when I called him back.
“Be very careful to mark your own position,” I warned him. “You know
what I mean.”
He knew, and I knew that he knew.
Meanwhile, I stuck an empty cartridge case in the parados behind my
head and waited.
Five flashes spat out again, and “pop--pop--pop--pop--pop” came up out
of the valley: and between me and them in the parapet I stuck a second
cartridge case----
I looked at my watch. It was half-past twelve. The post was finished,
and the trench deep enough to get along, crawling anyway.
“Cease work.”
* * * * *
The next day was so misty that you could see practically nothing over
five hundred yards, and the new post was useless. The following day
it had frozen again, and an inch of snow lay on the ground. It was
a sunny morning, and from the new post all Fricourt lay in full view
before me. How well I remember every detail of that city of the dead!
In the centre stood the white ruin of the church, still higher than the
houses around it, though a stubby stump compared to what it must have
been before thousands of shells reduced it to its present state. All
around were houses; roofless, wall-less skeletons all of them, save in
a few cases, where a red roof still remained, or a house seemed by some
magic to be still untouched. On the extreme right was Rose Cottage, a
well-known artillery mark; just to its left were some large park-gates,
with stone pillars, leading into Fricourt Wood; and just inside the
wood was a small cottage--a lodge, I suppose. The extreme northern part
of the village was invisible, as the ground fell away north of the
church. I could see where the road disappeared from view; then beyond,
clear of the houses, the road reappeared and ran straight up to the
skyline, a mile further on. A communication trench crossed this road:
(I remember we saw some men digging there one morning). With my glasses
I could see every detail; beyond the communication trench were various
small copses, and tracks running over the field; and on the skyline,
about three thousand yards away, was a long row of bushes.
And just to the left of it all ran the two white lace-borders of
chalk trenches, winding and wobbling along, up, up, up until they
disappeared over the hill to La Boiselle. Sometimes they diverged as
much as three hundred yards, but only to come in together again, so
close that it was hard to see which was ours and which the German. Due
west of Fricourt church they touched in a small crater chain.
It was a fascinating view. I could not realise that there lay a
_French_ village; I think we often forgot that we were on French soil,
and not on a sort of unreal earth that would disappear when the war was
over; especially was No Man’s Land a kind of neutral stage, whereon
was played the great game. To a Frenchman, of course, Fricourt was as
French as ever it had been. But I often forgot, when I watched the
shells demolishing a few more houses, that these were not German houses
deserving of their fate. Perhaps people will not understand this: it is
true, anyway.
I was drawing a sketch of the village, when lo! and behold! coolly
walking down the road into Fricourt came a solitary man. I had to
think rapidly, and decide it must be a German, because the thing was
so unexpected; I could not for the moment get out of my head the
unreasonable idea that it might be one of our own men! However, I soon
got over that.
“Sight your rifle at two thousand yards,” said I to Morgan, who was
with me. “Now, give it to me.”
Carefully I took aim. I seemed to be holding the rifle up at an absurd
angle. I squeezed, and squeezed----
The German jumped to one side, on to the grass at the side of the road,
and doubled for all he was worth out of sight into Fricourt! Needless
to say, I did not see him again to get another shot!
* * * * *
“They’ve been using that road last night, sir,” said 58 Morgan, while I
was taking a careful bearing on my empty cartridge case. (A prismatic
compass is invaluable for taking accurate cross-bearings.)
“Yes,” I said. “Why yes, of course, they must have used it last night.
I never thought of that. Good. We’ll get the artillery on there
to-night, and upset their ration-carts.”
This pleased the fancy of Sniper 58 Morgan, and a broad grin came over
his face at the thought of the Boche losing his breakfast.
“Maybe, sir, we’ll see the sausages on the road to-morrow morning.”
For which thought I commended him not a little: a sense of humour is
one of the attributes of a good sniper, just as rash conclusions are
not.
I then went down to No. 5 Post, where Jones was awaiting me, according
to arrangement. There I took a second bearing, and retired to my
dug-out to work out the two angles on the map. “From map to compass
add: from compass to map subtract” I repeated to myself, and disposed
of the magnetic variation summarily. Then with the protractor I
plotted out the angles. “Exactly. The small house with the grey roof
standing out by itself on the left. So that’s where you live, my
friend, is it?”
Once more I was up at the new post, scrutinising the grey-roofed house
with the telescope. After a long gaze, I almost jumped. I gave the
telescope to Morgan. He gazed intently for a moment.
Then, “Is that a hole, sir, over the door, in the shadow, like ...?”
“It is,” I answered
That night the machine-gun started popping as usual, when suddenly a
salvo of whizz-bangs screamed over, and H.E.’s joined in the game. All
round and about the little grey-roofed house flickered the flashes of
bursting shells. Then the enemy retaliated, and for a quarter of an
hour “a certain liveliness prevailed.” Then came peace. But there was
no sound all night of a machine-gun popping from Fricourt village; on
the other hand, our machine-guns had taken up the tune, with short
bursts of overhead fire, searching for those Boche ration carts. And
in the morning the grey-roofed cottage appeared with two tiles left on
the right-hand bottom corner of the roof, and the front wall had a huge
gap in it big enough to act as a mouth for fifty machine-guns. Only
Morgan was disappointed: all marks of the sausages had been cleared
away before dawn! After all, are not the Germans pre-eminently a tidy
people?
III
Private Ellis had hard blue eyes that looked at you, and looked, and
went on looking; they always reminded me of the colour of the sea when
a north wind is blowing and the blue is hard and bright. I have seen
two other pairs of eyes like them. One belonged to Captain Jefferies,
the big game shooter, who lectured on Sniping at the Third Army School.
The other pair were the property of a sergeant I met this week for the
first time. “Are you a marksman?” I asked him. “Yes, sir! Always a
marksman, sir.”
There is no mistaking those eyes. They are the eyes of a man who has
used them all his life, and found them grow steadier and surer every
year. They are essentially the eyes of a man who can watch, watch,
watch all day, and not get tired of watching; and they were the eyes of
my best sniper.
For Private Ellis had all the instincts of a cunning hunter. I had no
need to tell him to keep his telescope well inside the loophole, lest
the sun should catch on the glass; no need to remind him to stuff a
bit of sand-bag in the loophole when he left the post unoccupied. He
never forgot to let the sand-bag curtain drop behind him as he entered
the box, to prevent light coming into it and showing white through
a loophole set in dark earth. There was no need either to make sure
that he understood the telescopic sights on his rifle; and there
was no need to tell him that the Boches were clever people. He never
under-estimated his foe.
It was a warm day in early March. Private Ellis was in No. 5 Box,
opposite Aeroplane Trench. This post was very cunningly concealed. Our
front trench ran along a road, immediately behind which was a steep
chalk bank, the road having originally been cut out of a rather steep
slope. You will see the lie of the ground clearly enough on Map III.
Just about five yards behind this bank was cut a deep narrow trench,
and in this trench were built several snipers’ posts, with loopholes
looking out of the chalk bank. These loopholes were almost impossible
to see, as they were very nearly indistinguishable from the shadows in
the bank. Anyone who has hunted for oyster-catchers’ eggs on a pebbly
beach knows that black and white is the most protective colour scheme
existing. And so these little black loopholes were almost invisible in
the black and white of the chalk bank.
All the morning Private Ellis had been watching out of the corner
of his eye a little bit of glass shining in Aeroplane Trench. Now
Aeroplane Trench (as you will also see from the map) was a sap running
out from the German front trench into a sunken road. From the centre
sap two little branch saps ran up and down the road, and then slightly
forward; the whole plan of it rather resembled an aeroplane and gave
it its name. In it to-day was a Boche with a periscopic rifle; and
it was this little bit of glass at the top of the periscope, and the
nose of the rifle-barrel that Private Ellis was watching. Every now
and again the glass and nose-cap would give a little jump, and “plop”
a bullet would bury itself in our front parapet. One of our sentries
had had his periscope smashed during the morning, I was informed by a
company commander with rather the air of “What’s the use of you and
your snipers, if you can’t stop them sniping us?” I told Ellis about
the periscope, to which he replied: “It won’t break us, I guess,
sir--twopenn’orth of new glass for a periscope. It’s heads that count.”
In which remark was no little wisdom.
“Crack--plop,” and after a long interval another “Crack--zin--n--n--g,”
as a bullet ricocheted off a stone, and went away over the ridge and
fell with a little sigh somewhere in the ground right away beyond
Redoubt A. So it went on all the afternoon, while the sun was warming
everyone up and one dreamed of the summer, and warm days, dry trenches,
and short nights. Ellis had gone off rather reluctantly at midday,
and the other relief was there. There was a slumbrous sensation about
that brought on the feeling that there was no one really in the enemy
trenches at all. Yet there was the little glass eye looking at us: it
reminded one of a snake in the grass. It glittered, unblinking.
At about six o’clock I again visited the post. Ellis was back there,
and watching as keenly as ever.
“No luck?” I remarked. “I’m afraid your friend is too wily for you;
he’s not going to put his head over, when he can see through a
periscope as well.”
Still Private Ellis said little, but his eye was as clear and keen as
ever; and still the periscope remained.
“We must shell him out to-morrow,” I said, and went off.
At half-past seven we had “stood down,” and I was messing with “B”
Company, when I heard a voice at the top of the dug-out, and the
servant who was waiting--Lewis, I think it was--said a sniper wanted to
see me.
“Tell him to come down.”
Private Ellis appeared at the door. Not a muscle in his body or face
moved, but his eyes were glowing and glittering. “Got him, sir,” was
all he said.
“What?” I cried. “Got that Boche in Aeroplane Trench? By Jove, tell us
all about it.”
And so to the accompaniment of a whiskey and Perrier he told us exactly
what happened. It was not till well after “stand-to,” it appeared, that
any change had occurred in Aeroplane Trench. Then the periscope had
wobbled and disappeared below ground. Then there had been another long
wait, and the outline of the sunken road had begun to get faint. Then
slowly, very slowly, a pink forehead had appeared over the top, and as
slowly disappeared. I wish I had been there to watch Ellis then. I can
imagine him coolly, methodically sighting his rifle on the trench-edge,
and waiting. “I had to wait another minute, sir; then it appeared
again, the whole head this time. He thought it was too dark to be seen
... Oh, he won’t worry us any more, sir! I saw one of his arms go up,
and I thought I could see him fall against the back of the trench. But
it was getting so dark, I couldn’t have seen him five minutes later at
all.”
And if Ellis couldn’t, who could?
* * * * *
Next day, and for many days, there was no sniping from Aeroplane
Trench.