the dwelling house, stables, bams and everything else, all connected and built around a sort of court-yard — the open space or court being the depository for the manure. From the frequent shellings it had endured it was apparent that the Germans believed that it was and had been continuously used by our troops, while as a matter of fact, for nearly a year it had not been occupied at all. So when they told me to select a good position from which to operate a strafing gun, I decided that Sniper’s Barn was a pretty good place. It was only about four hundred yards behind our front line and less than five hundred from Germany, but across a narrow valley, which put it on a level with and, in some places, a few meters above the enemy line. It was an ideal observation post, as from there we could see at least a mile of the terrain behind the other fellow’s line, while, from our front line, we could see nothing beyond the narrow strip of no-man’s-land between the two trenches.
While I was first inspecting the place, the Germans gave it what we afterward came to know as their “daily hate.” That is, they put some fifteen or twenty shells into the place. Well, that did not look so good, but, after a little scouting around I noticed that, while the buildings bore the signs of frequent and severe shelling, the ground in front of them was almost entirely innocent of shell-holes. Carefully crawling down to a line of hedge which surrounded a garden patch in front of the house, I quickly decided that that was the place for the gun. Prior to this, at Messines, I had noticed that when we had a strafing post out in front of a group of buildings, the enemy had persistently shelled the buildings but never, excepting in case of a “short” did a shell burst near us.
There was at least a hundred yards between this hedge and the nearest of the buildings and the way those Dutchmen were shooting, those days, that was a-plenty. They could come pretty near to placing every shell into a five foot trench if they wanted to.
We dug in a little and built up a little, just behind the hedge and made a nice little nest, big enough for two men and the gun. (No use putting a half dozen in one spot where one shell might clean out the whole bunch.)
Beside the machine gun, I always had a rifle at hand, and spent a lot of time checking up on ranges to various points behind the enemy line. I did this with the machine gun too. There were innumerable shell holes filled with water, and it was a simple matter to shoot until the splash showed a hit. One had to be careful, though, and pick his time. Early morning was no good, for two reasons; we were shooting toward the east and the light was very bad and, as a general thing, the air was cool enough to cause a puff of vapor to appear at the muzzle — just like light smoke. As the enemy undoubtedly had good observers, it would have resulted in their blowing us out of there. But, during the afternoons, with the light in our favor and moderate temperature, we did very well.
From the start of this tour of duty we could see plenty of individuals and now and then a group of men. Sometimes, in the latter case, we would give them a burst from the gun, and, perhaps two or three times a day, would take a crack at a single man, with the rifle but we made no attempt to start a regular campaign of sniping at that time for the reason that our front line was in a sad state of disrepair and our men, necessarily had to expose themselves in moving up or down the line and, as the enemy appeared to take it easy, we did the same. At night however, we regularly shot up the cross-roads, main line trenches and dumps which our daily observation showed were regularly used. As our position was in plain sight from the enemy line, it was necessary to devise some means to conceal the flash of the gun. At first, we simply hung up a sand-bag screen about two feet in front of the muzzle but this was not very satisfactory as the bullets soon cut a hole large enough for some sparks to go through. Then our ordnance people had a lot of contrivances made which looked (and were) very much like the ordinary mufflers used on gas engines. They stopped the flash, all right, but were so heavy that, mounted on the muzzle of the gun, they not only changed all our elevations but rendered the guns very inaccurate. I had some ideas of my own and found time to slip back, now and then, to our armourer’s shop and do some experimenting and, eventually, turned out a gadget that worked perfectly. It was a crude bit of work but it did the business.
I made it from a French 75 case. I first cut a strip some two inches wide out of one side — extending from the base to the mouth — then riveted a narrow strip of sheet steel along the opposite side, this strip extending out over the mouth of the case and being formed into a regular bayonet-lock, such as used on the Civil War muskets. I cut a hole, about one inch in diameter in the base of the shell, directly in line with the muzzle of the gun. I then riveted three flanges inside the case, curved from the top toward the front and downward, these projected about one-half inch. That was all there was to it at first. No flash showed from the front but we found that occasionally one of the sparks, which were deflected downward and out the open bottom of the thing, would give a faint twinkle. I then added two small hooks, riveted onto the front (base) of the shell case and hung a strip of wet sand bag on them, drawing the comers back and attaching them to the legs of the tripod. With this device, I have sat up on top of our parapet within seventy-five yards of Heinie’s line and fired to my heart’s content. It was not heavy enough to impair accuracy and had but a slight effect on elevations and we very soon checked up on that. I do not know whether or not any more were ever made. Our Colonel came up one night with a party of officers to see it work and they gave it their approval.
For about a month after we occupied the front lines about Captain’s Post things went along in their usual way. At one time there was a sort of general attack along our front to give the higher command a chance to try out some new smoke bombs and smoke shells. This, I believe, was about the first time the smoke screen was used. Our battalion got into the lines and stood by in case a counter attack should be made, while we gunners took the machine guns and set them up to cover our infantry’s advance if necessary. It turned out that we were not needed so we sat there and watched as pretty a show as has ever been seen. At the proper signal, every gun back of our lines commenced dropping these new smoke shells in a continuous row along the top of the German parapet; as each shell struck it burst and sent out a dense cloud of smoke which soon became a dense wall through which no one could see at all. Our bombers then advanced and threw some hand grenades over into the enemy trenches and then retired, no attempt being made to take any part of the line or prisoners.
Everything seemed to go fine with our side, but the Germans naturally expected a general attack to commence, so they socked shells all over our trenches and tore things apart in general. It was about as bad a bombardment as we had encountered and it sure busted up those trenches, which had been none too good in the first place. The rain had set in for keeps just about this time and there was nothing but mud — mud — mud everywhere. Those trenches just oozed away like melting butter and it was a continual job to barricade them up with sand bags. Then to top it off, the Germans held the higher ground and there were places where they could dam up the water, holding it until an unusually hard rain would come, whereupon they would open the gates and give us the full benefit of the whole dose. I have seen them turn six or seven feet of water into our trenches in less than an hour and at places in our communication trenches it would be over a man’s head, a man being drowned in it one night.
Under such conditions it was an impossibility for us to dig and the best we could do was to construct sand- bag barricades or parapets. These gave some protection from bullets and small fragments but were no use against direct hits of any kind of shells, even a little whiz-bang would tear right through or blow them apart. At one time, for more than two weeks, more than two hundred yards of our front line parapet was down and we could not get it built up again. The result was, that when a man had to move about he had to do it exposed to full view of the German snipers and even at night we were continually having men hit by stray bullets. In the day time it was a sure bet someone was going to get hit, as the Germans had some good snipers who watched for just such opportunities.
Despite all this hard luck, our men managed to finally get up some sort of screen, and behind it, assisted by the engineers, they constructed a new line of trenches slightly in the rear of the old one, which was then abandoned except for a listening post and two or three machine-gun positions. We also got some pretty good barbed wire strung out in front. The German also had his share of hard luck about this time and at nights did not bother us so much, which allowed all this construction to be finished. But we always got a few shells and rifle grenades in the daytime, and some high-angle bombs, but with these the mud was actually our friend as it blanketed the effect of the shell bursts and unless one fell right on top of you it did no harm.
The most trying thing about all this digging was that the entire trench system here was nothing more or less than one continuous grave, and it was difficult to dig anywhere without uncovering bodies. Many of these graves had been marked by crosses put up by comrades to give name, date of death and organization, but hundreds had merely an uninscribed cross or were unmarked. One of our sergeants discovered the grave of his brother, who had served in the King’s Royal Rifles, and I ran across a grave marked with the name of Meyers, Indianapolis, Indiana, who was with the Princess Pats and said to have been the first man killed in action. There was a string of old English and French trenches, both in front and behind our lines, and all more or less filled with bodies that had never been properly buried. Also there were plenty of Germans mixed up amongst them. Whenever possible, we gave these bodies a proper burial, but with many of them nothing could be done without incurring unnecessary
