had discovered it. Apparently he had not, so we decided to make use of it now. It was pretty muddy — everything in that part of the world was muddy in those days — but we managed to get in and set up our paraphernalia, ready for business.
We waited a long while, all the time carefully scanning the enemy line and the country behind it. There’s where I learned to chew tobacco. We dared not smoke and I wanted something in the way of a stimulant. The kid never would chew but I managed to do a fairly good job of it, only that I never could learn to spit like a real tobacco chewer. Guess you have to learn that at an early age.
Finally, just as I was about to call it a day and pull out, the boy called my attention to a certain place in the German front line where we had been observing some kind of construction work going on for several days — building a new machine-gun emplacement, we surmised — and I noticed that there was movement of some kind going on behind the screen of muddy-colored cloth which they had erected at that point. (On both sides there were many strips of this screen cloth, some of them concealing real operations but most of them merely decoys — camouflage.) This one was the real thing as we soon discovered, as we caught occasional glimpses of men moving around the edges; so after watching them for some minutes, I decided to take a shot — just for luck. Bou watched carefully through the ’scope and I put a shot right through the middle of the screen. Then we saw them. I got in two more shots as five or six men tried to climb over one another getting out of there. Don’t know whether or not any of them were hit, but Bou said he was pretty sure of one of them. Under such conditions, it is virtually impossible to tell whether or not you have hit your man.
One day, just as I was about to start back to Sniper’s Bam “to see what I could see,” the Colonel came along, accompanied by Capt. Cook, our Medical Officer. That Colonel of ours was a wonder. Never a day passed, fair weather or foul, heavy shelling or none, but he made the rounds of his front lines in spite of “hell and high water.” He asked the usual questions about conditions and received the customary answer, which was: “All right, sir.” It seems funny now, at the range of fourteen years, but that was the conventional reply, even though we had just carried out several killed and a lot more wounded. I well remember one morning when Heinie had just “busted” one of his “wooly bears” right over our trench and hit twelve men with the one shell — about half of them killed and the others horribly mangled by the razor-sharp pieces of shell — and the Colonel came along and asked, as usual, “How is it with you this morning?” And the answer came back, just the same as if nothing had happened, “All right, sir.”
Well, this morning, as I said, the Medico was with him, and as their route back to Ridgewood, along the P. & O. trench, was the same as mine, I accompanied them as far as the place where we turned off to go to Sniper’s Barn. Arriving there, I invited them to come along and have a look at some Germans. The Colonel could not take the time then (he did later), but Captain Cook came with me. I had been watching and waiting until Fritz had finished his “daily hate” and I had seen a dozen shells bursting in and around the barn and so was satisfied there would be no more shelling there during the day. There’s another funny thing. Heinie was so thorough and methodical that we could tell from day to day and hour to hour just what to expect. He had a regular routine. Certain batteries would, at fixed hours, shell certain localities. We even learned to know the sound of the different guns and could, in many cases, tell very close to where the shell was going and what kind and size it was. He had one battery of 150 mm rifles which always fired what we called “wooly bears,” high explosive, time-fuzed shells which burst overhead and scattered razor-sharp pieces of steel over a wide area. These were too fast to dodge. They arrived, like the whiz-bangs, right along with, or ahead of, the report of its coming. The howitzers, of any calibre, announced themselves long before their arrival — the sound taking a short cut, while the shells travelled a couple of miles up and then down.
The sound of the report of the gun and the beginning of the theme song, if I may borrow a term from the movies, arrived at about the same time, the latter increasing in strength and volume for some time and then diminishing as the shell took to the higher altitude — then it would increase and then was when you had a right to worry. It was on its way down and coming closer all the time but — where the hell is it going to light? Just one of the little things that keep war from becoming monotonous.
Anyway, I felt sure that there would be no more shelling of Sniper’s Bam that day unless someone foolishly exposed himself so the German observers could see him. So I had no compunctions about inviting the Captain and he was eager to go. We crawled along a shallow trench and behind the hedge and made our way into the little chamber which I had fixed up as a sniping nest. The telescope was already in place and we soon located several of the Fritzes, away behind their lines. They were too far away for effective rifle fire but I guess the Captain got a thrill out of just seeing them. Up to that time he had never had a chance to see one of the enemy — excepting prisoners. Our Medical Corps was pretty busy, those days, patching up the cripples and seldom had a chance to go sightseeing.
Under the ordinary conditions of trench warfare, where the opposing lines are but one hundred yards apart — and often less — the opportunities for accurate rifle shooting from the front line are few and far between, that is, unless special snipers “nests” have been built into the parapet. Several times, by doing a lot of night work, we managed to construct chambers in the embankments under our parapets, with concealed loop-holes, from whence we were able to do some real and accurate short-range sniping. Unless these emplacements were planned in advance and built during the initial construction of the trench, it was a matter of several nights of downright hard labor to fix one up, as it necessitated the digging out of a considerable section of the whole embankment, reinforcing the chamber with timbers and then replacing all the dirt and sand bags so as to give no indication that they had been disturbed. The hoop-hole must be screened with a frayed sand-bag and, to be reasonably safe, should be made with two of the steel plates which are commonly used at the peep-holes along the top of the parapet; one of them forming the top, or roof, of the loop-hole and the other set in below at such an angle that any shot striking it will be deflected downward, into the ground. If the hole is down near the bottom of the parapet it will be impossible for an enemy to put a bullet into it — even if he discovers the place. From one such position I was able to shoot straight into the loop-hole of a machine gun emplacement, diagonally across the way and at a distance of not over one hundred yards. I only did it once, however — that is, one day — for next day, when I tried it, it was just like shooting in one of those galleries where they have a hole for the bulls-eye and a hanging piece of steel behind it so that, when you get a bull, you “ring the bell.” Heinie had simply put a steel plate in the hole and all I could do was to ring the bell, without doing any damage. I presume it was so fixed that they could swing it out of the way when they wanted to fire; but, as all the shooting they did with that gun was done at night, when, of course, I could not see to use the rifle, I had to give it up until, acting on my information, the F.O.O. (Forward Observing Officer) of the Lahore battery decided to have a try at it.
That was a wicked-shooting bunch — those Indians. Formerly a six-gun horse artillery battery, they had exchanged their thirteen-pounders for the regulation eighteen-pounders of the field artillery. For some reason or other, they never seemed to be restricted as to the amount of ammunition they could expend in any one day — as was the case with our other batteries at that time. They got on the target in record time and then proceeded to pour in the H.E. shells at a furious rate. They soon had the covering of earth and sand-bags entirely blown away, exposing a cubical concrete emplacement underneath. I knew it was there; in fact had been watching its construction for a month and had reported it, time and again but our own (Canadian) artillery officers evidently did not believe me. It had been so cleverly built into and under the old parapet that there was nothing to indicate its presence from our front line; but, from our elevated position back at Sniper’s Barn, we could readily see the progress of the work.
Those eighteen-pounders could do nothing with it. Of course, a direct hit could chip off a few bits of concrete but the nut was too tough for the cracker, so they gave it up and turned the job over to the 9.2s. Those big boys finished it, and it happened that Bouchard and I were on the job at the time and managed to get some good shooting at the survivors as they scrambled out of the pill-box when one of the big shells uprooted it and turned it over on its side.
I spoke of the Lahore Battery as Indians. Lest I be misunderstood, I would explain that, while they came from the Indian city of Lahore, the personnel was composed entirely of white men — Englishmen, I should say; for, I am told, the native Indians are, for the most part, Aryans and therefore to be considered as members of the Caucasian family, despite their dusky complexion.
But, to get back to our loop-hole. It is never advisable to have it faced directly toward the front, but at an angle, up or down the line — preferably to the left for a right-handed shooter. Enemy observers, using periscopes, are prone to scan the ground in their immediate front, depending upon others, all along the line, to do the same; that is, to watch their own sectors. Thus, it is an easy matter to have the hole perfectly screened from the direct
