On both sides thousands upon thousands of lives were saved by wind, since it was not easy to judge its strength in the trenches, and as the targets aimed at were usually only half a head, the very smallest error of judgment resulted in a miss. Once a bullet had whizzed by a German’s ear within a few inches, a second exposure of the head was rarely made in the same place.
Trench sniping was, in fact, as defined by Colonel Langford Lloyd, “the art of hitting a very small object straight off and without the advantage of a sighting shot.”
At a certain spot in our lines not very far from Auchonvillers, known to fame as “Ocean Villas,” a German sniper had done fell work. It is hard to say how many British lives he had taken, but his tally was not small. He lurked somewhere in the mass of heaps of earth, rusty wire and sandbags which there formed a strong point of the German line. There were twenty or thirty loopholes from which he might be firing. The problem was from which of these did his shots actually come? The Germans had a trick of multiplying their loopholes in this fashion. Many steel plates were shoved up on the parapet in the most obvious positions. These were rarely shot through, but they were certainly sometimes used. The German argument must have been that if you have thirty loopholes, it is thirty to one against the particular one from which you fire being under observation at that particular moment.
On our side there was no loophole whatever covering the area in which this German sniper worked, and any attempt to spot his post had perforce to be done over the top of the parapet. As he was simply waiting and watching for people to look over, it was only a very hurried and cursory glance that could be taken. At length, however, the Hun was located by an officer, in the vicinity of two enormous steel plates set near the top of his parapet.
As I have said, there was no loophole upon our side, so orders were given that one should be put in during the night right opposite to those two big plates. The next morning it was hardly light when the German sniper shot into our new loophole, which was at once closed. The trap was now ready, and the officer whose duty it was to deal with the matter went one hundred yards down the trench to the right flank, while an assistant protruded the end of a black stick which he happened to have in his hand, keeping at the same time well to the side. At the same moment the officer on the flank shot at the right hand of the two big plates once, and then again. The bullets rang aloud upon the plates, and the German sniper at the second shot betrayed himself. Thinking as he did that the shots were fired from the open loophole opposite to him, he fired at it, and the gas from his rifle gave away his position. The two big plates were, of course, dummies, and he was firing almost from ground level, and from an emplacement cleverly concealed by a mass of broken wire. The loophole was now shut for a moment or two, and then once again opened, the officer on the flank having moved to a position where he could command the German sniper’s loophole. His cap had fallen off. He had a bald head. Once found, and unaware of the fact the sniper was soon dealt with.
One could relate very many such incidents, but they are rather grisly. Sooner or later nearly every troublesome German sniper met his fate.
But the duty of the sniper changed as the war went on. At first his job was to dominate the German snipers, destroy their moral, and make life secure for his own comrades. At the same time there was his Intelligence work. Later, as the warfare became more open, he proved his value over and over again in attack. When a trench was taken, it was his duty to get out in front and (lying in a shell-hole) to keep the enemy heads down while his companions consolidated the newly-won position. When an advance was held up by a machine-gun, it was the sniper’s business to put it out of action if he could, and the list of V.C.’s and D.C.M.’s, as well as thousands of deeds of nameless men, prove how often he was successful. In the last advance of the Canadian Corps, their very skilled sniping officer, Major Armstrong, told me that a single sniper put out of action a battery of 5.9 guns, shooting down one after another the German officer and men who served it—a great piece of work, and one thoroughly worthy of General Currie’s splendid Corps.
But the machine-gun was the sniper’s special target. Once, of course, a machine-gun was spotted, or moved in the open, a single sniper was quite capable of putting it out of action. In fact, the sniper’s duties were legion. He had to be a really high-class shot, a good and accurate observer, and a good judge of distance, wind and light. Suffice it that in the more open warfare many a sniper killed his fifty Germans in a single day, and whether as a rifleman or scout, he bore a part more perilous than that of the rank and file of his comrades. If you who read this know a man who served his year or two in the sniping section of his battalion, you know one whom it is well that you should honour.
A position which was much used by German snipers is supposed to have been trees. This was the theme of many pictures in the illustrated papers, but as a matter of fact a high tree makes a wretched sniping post, and I rarely allowed one to be used on our side. The Germans, however, did extensively use the pollard willows which were so common a feature on the First Army front. We did not use them, as I have said, but we found that the German sense of humour appears to be much tickled by seeing, or thinking he sees, a Britisher falling out of a tree, and when our sniping became very good, and the enemy consequently shy of giving a target, a dummy in a tree worked by a rope sometimes caused Fritz and Hans to show themselves unwisely.
When the sniping was of high class on both sides, all kinds of ruses were employed to get the other side to give a target. But one had to be very careful not to go too far in this sort of work or trickery, lest a minenwerfer should take his part in the duel.