CHAPTER TWELVE
CHASING MONOTONY
At present the authorities are engaged in impressing upon us the truth of the maxim which says that you must not run before you can walk. Our immediate duty is to show that we can stand the test of ordinary trench warfare.
First, such every-day nuisances as the German sniper. And here we have a pleasant little success to record.
When we took over these trenches, snipers were numerous and vigilant. If you raised your head above the parapet, one of two things happened. Either you heard a sound like the crack of a whip-lash close to your ear; or you did not. If you did, you were lucky. If you did not, you were buried at dusk.
There is one piece of slightly rising ground in the enemy’s line which commands an oblique view of a stretch of our front trenches. For a week we have been pestered by a sniper concealed somewhere along this eminence, about three hundred yards away, on our right front. We have scrutinized its whole expanse with periscopes and through loopholes, but there is no sign of trench or emplacement where the sniper might be concealed.
Yesterday that untutored but resourceful fire-eater, Eddie Gillette, turned his attention to the matter, the urgency of which had been impressed upon him by the fact that a sniper’s bullet, travelling sidewise down the trench, had chipped a groove in Eddie’s own “tin derby” that very morning, Eddie’s head being inside at the time.
“We got to locate that lobster,” he observed. And he did.
In a field behind the support line there grows, or rather, rots, a crop of derelict and much-bombarded turnips. Last night Eddie, after a conference with his officer, Boone Cruttenden, and the top machine-gun sergeant, disappeared for an hour into the hinterland, and brought back with him an armful of selected esculents. The largest of these he proceeded this morning to spear upon a flat lath of wood. Upon the top of this eminence he perched his own steel helmet, at a jaunty angle. Attended by a respectfully interested cohort of disciples, or rubbernecks, he next selected a suitable spot in the front-line trench, and with the help of a length of rope and a little ingenuity succeeded in lashing the turnip-laden lath to the revetment of the parapet in such a fashion as to make it possible to slide the lath up and down.
It was a still, sunny, September morning, and the whole line was quiet, except for an occasional rifle-shot, and the intermittent boom of artillery beyond the next hill-crest to the south. Eddie’s preliminary adjustments were barely completed when Boone Cruttenden arrived, carrying a periscope and attended by the machine-gun sergeant.
“Got everything fixed, Gillette?” enquired Boone.