Page:The history and achievements of the Fort Sheridan officers' training camps.djvu/218

 ��THE FORT SHERIDAN ASSOCIATION

��Each squad had a chest high tripod which supported a bag of sand. A pistol pointing toward a barrack wall was firmly set in the sandbag, the tripod being fifteen to twenty feet away from the wall. A man with a little black cardboard bull's eye (about an inch in diameter) fastened to a stick would stand close to the wall and hold the bull's eye over a sheet of paper somewhere in the vicinity of the range of vision of another man who glanced along the sights of the pistol. At the verbal command or hand signal of the man aiming, the man by the wall would move the bull's eye up or down, right or left, until the aimer called "stop!" He would then, through a pinhole in the center of the bull's eye, mark a little dot on the paper with a sharp pointed pencil. The man at the pistol would aim three times. Seldom did one dot coincide with another. But they were not meant to. The object was to get three dots very close to- gether and equidistant, so that when lines were drawn connecting the points, the result would be a minute equilateral triangle. A man who could accom- plish that, proved himself a skillful aimer.

After demolishing the barracks with triangular broadsides the marksmen ventured onto the range and there were shown how to hold the weapon and the proper posture to take in firing. Six to eight targets were used, behind and beneath which men were stationed to point out with long markers the spot where a bullet hit, and then to lower the target and paste over the holes so as to be able to distinguish the perforations of the succeeding marksmen. These men who fired stood in single file facing the target, a line of equal length for each target. Men who had fired helped load clips for those who had not. Each man fired once at fifteen yards and again at twenty-five, five shots each time. After that firing was continued at twenty-five yards by men in turn until

���THE ARTILLERY WAS THERE

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