FIND THE SNIPER.
(Look for the rifle barrel.)
The First Army were holding from just south of Armentières down to Vimy Ridge, and subsequently it held almost to Arras, but at this time their lines did not stretch so far south. All the northern part of their trench system was in an absolutely flat plain, where trenches were shallow owing to the presence of water at no great depth underground, and were really much more in the nature of breastworks. In most places it was useless to go out behind the parados, as the ground was so low that you got no view. This refers, at any rate, to all the northern line, after which we entered the coal region, where posts could be dug in the slag-heaps and in the ruins of shelled buildings. As a rule, to put a post in a shelled building in the northern part of the line was simply to court disaster, as these buildings, where they were near enough to the line to admit of sniping, were continually shelled and sprayed with machine-gun bullets. But further south buildings were more common and might be made use of. As a rule, however, I found that the placing of sniping posts in either buildings or trees was a mistake. For once such posts were discovered by the enemy he had little difficulty in ticking them off on his map and demolishing them. Of course the same was true of posts in more open ground, but these were much harder to spot and it is better to be shelled in the open ground than in a house where you are liable to be hurt by falling bricks, etc.
The problem then that the First Army line presented was an interesting one, and I have always thought it much the most difficult line to organize for sniping of which I had knowledge.
Having learned my work in the trenches of the Third Army I found that in the First Army I had first of all to unlearn a great deal. The problem was essentially different, but after a year’s experience, during which practically every portion of the Front was visited, one collected a great number of ruses and plans. Still at first to put a concealed loophole into the Fauquissart or Neuve Chapelle breastworks was a really difficult problem, which indeed was only solved when, as I have explained in an earlier chapter, “Gray’s Boards” were invented. These were immediately successful, and from the time that they were first used, it was easier to make a good loophole in the breastworks than in any other part of our line.
There were here and there, all along the Army front, what may be known as “bad spots,” that is, places where, through some advantage of ground, the enemy dominated us. In such places our snipers had to redouble their efforts, and even then the enemy remained a thorn in our sides. There were other places, of course, where we had an equivalent advantage, and there we were soon able to force the Germans to live an absolutely troglodytic existence. In fact orders were published in the German army on some fronts, that when a man was off duty he was to remain in a dug-out.
Of course the greatest difficulty that we had was the continual movement of divisions. A division would just be settling down comfortably and getting its sniping into good order, when it would be ordered to depart to another Army, and the incoming division would almost always succeed in giving away some of the posts. This was a necessary evil, and could not be helped, but the advent of a single really bad sniping division gave an immense amount of extra work. It was exactly as if a party of really capable sportsmen were shooting an area for big game, or, better still, a Scottish deer forest. Imagine these sportsmen replaced by careless and ignorant tourists. The ground would inevitably be maltreated, the wrong beasts shot, corries shot when the wind was unfavourable, and all the deer stampeded onto the next forest. Of course in this case the deer did not stampede, but plucked up courage and shot back.
This condition of things was of course impossible to remedy, but we were luckier than other Armies, since our southern wing was formed by the Canadian Corps, who had the same trenches for fifteen months, and who never changed their divisions. In this Corps many of the reliefs worked beautifully, the incoming and the outgoing sniping officers being thoroughly in accord with each other. Major Armstrong, a well-known British Columbian big-game shot, was Corps Sniping Officer, and there was no keener.
