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:
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.”