The Leinsters had given all the German snipers names. One, believed to be established in a tree, was known as Peter Weber, another was Hans, another Fritz. One of the Leinsters, an excellent marksman, spent the whole of his spare time sniping. He had his little corner, and when he came back he used to regale his friends with fabulous stories of old Germans with long white beards that he had seen. He had “got” an officer the morning of the day I was in those trenches, and the “frightfulness,” which always follows after a sniper’s bullet has found its billet, went on with great regularity all through the afternoon in the shape of half-hourly salvoes of whizz-bangs.
The sniper’s job is no sinecure. Both sides are always engaged in trying to locate snipers, and once a sniper’s nest is discovered, a few rounds with a machine-gun will generally bring him down, however well concealed he may be. A sniper never knows but that an enemy marksman has found him out, and is waiting, finger on trigger, for the slightest movement on his quarry’s part to pick him off.
Sniping is an integral part of trench warfare. The Germans attach so much importance to it that they have not hesitated to issue expensive telescopic-sight rifles to their picked marksmen. They keep machine-guns and clamped rifles trained on certain spots, and a man always ready to open fire immediately a movement becomes visible over a certain measured space with a good background. A certain amount of wastage from sniping is inevitable. The trench lines wind so much that it is not always possible to make trenches secure from every angle of fire. We have to buy our experience, and I have passed in our trenches many a newly heightened parapet or freshly constructed traverse, the price of which was a man’s life.
As far as sniping is concerned, I believe that the British soldier holds the mastery. In our Regular army, the private cannot reach the maximum of pay until he has passed as a first-class shot, with the result that almost all our Regulars are fair marksmen, and some are very fine shots indeed. Of the Territorials, probably the London battalions contain the best riflemen. There are some very good snipers among the Indians and also the Canadians, as both possess in their ranks a good percentage of hunters.
In a German trench.
One soldier watches the periscope and the other attends to the telephone.
I have been in several German trenches, and they were all well constructed. The Germans are the beavers of trench warfare. They were quick to recognize the rôle that heavy artillery was destined to play in deciding the fortunes of the war of positions. Their aim has therefore been to construct dug-outs, proof, if possible, even against hits with high-explosive shells, in which their men can take shelter during an artillery bombardment, and emerge, when the guns lift and the infantry assault, to defend the trench with machine-guns, many of which are made to sink at will into specially constructed cement shelters.
The Germans work with antlike industry. Thus, in the eight days that elapsed between the loss of the trenches round and about the château of Hooge, on the Ypres-Menin road, on July 30, and their recapture by our infantry on August 9, they constructed an amazing network of trenches and dug-outs. The vast mine-crater (caused by the mine we exploded here on July 19 when we reoccupied it) resembled an amphitheatre with its tiers of bomb proof shelters scooped out of the crumbling sides of the chasm, and shored up with tree-trunks. The dug-outs in the trenches took a diagonal plunge downwards, were most solidly constructed, and afforded accommodation for four or five men at a time. They were, like all German dug-outs, quite comfortably furnished with beds and furniture from the abandoned cottages in the vicinity.
There are known to be trenches in the German lines which are lit by electric light from Lille, but I have not seen any of these. Apropos of the Lille electric-light supply, it is a fact that for many weeks after the Germans had occupied Lille, Armentières, the important industrial centre which is in our lines and which received its electric current from Lille, only five miles or so away, continued to draw its electric power as before. The joke was too good to last, and one day without warning the current was cut off. It is believed that a spy revealed to the Germans the fact that they were lighting the operations of the Allies.
What has struck me particularly about the German trenches I have been in is the extraordinary collection of objects of all kinds that the men have accumulated there. The German soldier resembles the magpie in his pilfering and hoarding habits. Psychologists must explain the mental state of a man who will go into action with articles of ladies’ underwear in his haversack, or who will take ladies’ boots, a feather boa, or a plush-covered photograph-album with him into the trenches. Their predilection for looting ladies’ lingerie gave rise to a legend which in its numerous versions resembles the story of the Russians or the Bowmen of Mons. This story, which was generally current after Neuve Chapelle, was to the effect that the infantry on entering the village had found some girls, half demented with fright, hiding in a cellar. The theory was that they had been carried off by the German troops for their own base uses.