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.”