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 the beginning of '15. He had taken up sniping and made himself a dead shot. He had the hunter's instinct and would wait hours behind the sandbags for the sight of a German head in the trenches opposite. He seldom missed his man, or that part of his body which showed for a second. Lately he had taken to the habit of crawling out into No Man's Land and waiting in some shell-hole for the dawn, when Germans came out to mend their wire or drag in a dead body. He generally left another dead man as a bait for the living. Then he would come back with a grim smile and eat his breakfast wolfishly, after cutting a notch in one of the beams of his dug-out.

"He's a Hun-hater, body and soul," said the Colonel. "We want more of 'em. All the same, Brand makes me feel queer by his ferocity. I like a humourous fellow who does his killing cheerfully."

After that I met Brand and took a drink with him in his dug-out. He answered my remarks gruffly for a time.

"I hear you go in for sniping a good deal," I said, by way of conversation.

"Yes. It's murder made easy."

"Do you get many targets?"

"It's a waiting game. Sometimes they get careless."

He puffed at a black old pipe, quite silent for a time. Presently he told me about a "young'un" who popped his head over the parapet, twice, to stare at something on the edge of the mine-crater.

"I spared him twice. The third time I said, 'Better dead,' and let go at him. The kid was too easy to miss."

Something in the tone of his voice told me that he hated himself for that.

"Rather a pity," I mumbled.

"War," he said. "Bloody war."

There was a candle burning on the wooden bench on