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, 134 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 135 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 136 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 137 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 ... 138 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 139 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:
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.” 140
“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 141 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 142 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: 143
“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 144 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 145 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 146 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.” 147
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 148 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? 149
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 150 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 151 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. 152
“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 153 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.
