Sniping in France/Chapter 5

CHAPTER V. SOME SNIPING MEMORIES WHEN first I came into the First Army area the main point which struck me was the difference between the trenches where my work now lay and those of the Third Army. The Third Army had, of course, taken over from the French, and their trenches were really in the nature of deep ditches, without any vast amount of sandbags. Sometimes these trenches extended through a clayey formation, but more often they were in chalk. This chalk made front line observation in the bright sunlight somewhat trying, as there was always a dazzle in the rays reflected from the white background. In the Third Army area also the ground was rolling, and it was nearly always possible to obtain some kind of a position of vantage behind the parados. For this purpose I had had a special portable loophole made, shaped something in the form of a wide triangle, but the back shutter of which slid along in grooves. This back shutter was made of steel and formed a very fine protection, as even if an enemy sniper put a bullet through the front loophole, the bullet was stopped by the sliding shutter behind, unless, that is, the shot happened to be fired—a twenty to one chance—along the exact line in which one was looking through the two loopholes. A good many of these loopholes were used in the Third Army, but I found that conditions in the First Army rendered them of no great value.

FIND THE SNIPER. (Look for the rifle barrel.)

The First Army were holding from just south of Armentieres down to Vimy Ridge, and subsequently it held almost to Arras, but at this time their lines did not stretch so far south. All the northern part of their trench system was in an absolutely flat plain, where trenches were shallow owing to the presence of water at no great depth underground, and were really much more in the nature of breastworks. In most places it was useless to go out behind the parados, as the ground was so low that you got no view. This refers, at any rate, to all the northern line, after which we entered the coal region, where posts could be dug in the slag-heaps and in the ruins of shelled buildings. As a rule, to put a post in a shelled building in the northern part of the line was simply to court disaster, as these buildings, where they were near enough to the line to admit of sniping, were continually shelled and sprayed with machine-gun bullets. But further south buildings were more common and might be made use of. As a rule, however, I found that the placing of sniping posts in either buildings or trees was a mistake. For once such posts were discovered by the enemy he had little difficulty in ticking them off on his map and demolishing them. Of course the same was true of posts in more open ground, but these were much harder to spot and it is better to be shelled in the open ground than in a house where you are liable to be hurt by falling bricks, etc.

The problem then that the First Army line presented was an interesting one, and I have always thought it much the most difficult line to organize for sniping of which I had knowledge.

Having learned my work in the trenches of the Third Army I found that in the First Army I had first of all to unlearn a great deal. The problem was essentially different, but after a year's experience, during which practically every portion of the Front was visited, one collected a great number of ruses and plans. Still at first to put a concealed loophole into the Fauquissart or Neuve Chapelle breastworks was a really difficult problem, which indeed was only solved when, as I have explained in an earlier chapter, " Gray's Boards " were invented. These were immediately successful, and from the time that they were first used, it was easier to make a good loophole in the breastworks than in any other part of our line.

There were here and there, all along the Army front, what may be known as " bad spots," that is, places where, through some advantage of ground, the enemy dominated us. In such places our snipers had to redouble their efforts, and even then the enemy remained a thorn in our sides. There were other places, of course, where we had an equivalent advantage, and there we were soon able to force the Germans to live an absolutely troglodytic existence. In fact orders were published in the German army on some fronts, that when a man was off duty he was to remain in a dug-out.

Of course the greatest difficulty that we had was the continual movement of divisions. A division would just be settling down comfortably and getting its sniping into good order, when it would be ordered to depart to another Army, and the incoming division would almost always succeed in giving away some of the posts. This was a necessary evil, and could not be helped, but the advent of a single really bad sniping division gave an immense amount of extra work. It was exactly as if a party of really capable sportsmen were shooting an area for big game, or, better still, a Scottish deer forest. Imagine these sportsmen replaced by careless and ignorant tourists. The ground would inevitably be maltreated, the wrong beasts shot, corries shot when the wind was unfavourable, and all the deer stampeded onto the next forest. Of course in this case the deer did not stampede, but plucked up courage and shot back.

This condition of things was of course impossible to remedy, but we were luckier than other Armies, since our southern wing was formed by the Canadian Corps, who had the same trenches for fifteen months, and who never changed their divisions. In this Corps many of the reliefs worked beautifully, the incoming and the outgoing sniping officers being thoroughly in accord with each other. Major Armstrong, a well-known British Columbian big-game shot, was Corps Sniping Officer, and there was no keener.

Of course it must be understood, as I have tried to explain before, that in writing this book I realize that my point of view is an exceedingly narrow one, and that I look at everything from the point of an officer whose business it was to consider sniping, observation and scouting of paramount importance. We were continually getting new snipers who took the places of those who had either become casualties, or had been put to other work. New snipers were nearly always optimistic, and it was quite a common thing for them to think that they were doing the enemy much more damage than was really the case. A conversation has been known to run as follows :

" Morning, you two "

" Good morning, sir."

" Anything doing ? '"

" Smith got a 'un this morning, sir."

" Good. How do you know ? "

" He give a cry, threw up his hands and fell back."

TELESCOPIC SIGHTS. Diagrams showing point of aim.

Now this may have been correct, but, as a matter of fact, continued observation showed that a man shot in ordinary trench warfare very very rarely either threw up his hands or fell back. He nearly always fell forward and slipped down. For this the old Greek rendering is best, " And his knees were loosened."

We soon found that a very skilled man with a telescope could tell pretty accurately whether a man fired at had been hit, or had merely ducked, and this was the case even when only the " head of the target " was visible ; but to be certain of his accuracy, it was necessary that the observer should have had a long experience of his work, coupled with real aptitude for it. The idea of how to spot whether a German was hit or not was suggested by big-game shooting experiences. An animal which is fired at and missed always stands tense for the fraction of a second before it bounds away, but when an animal is struck by the bullet there is no pause. It bounds away at once on the impact, or falls. Thus, a stag shot through the heart commences his death rush at once, to fall dead within fifty yards, whereas a stag missed gives that tell-tale sudden start.

In dealing with trench warfare sniping a very capable observer soon learned to distinguish a hit from a miss, but there were naturally many observers who never reached the necessary degree of skill. A reason once advanced for claiming a hit was that the Germans had been shouting for stretcher-bearers, but a question as to what was the German word for stretcher-bearer brought confusion upon the young sniper, whose talents were promptly used elsewhere !

But taken long by broad the accuracy of the information given by snipers was really wonderful. On one occasion the snipers of the 33rd Division reported that two Germans had been seen with the number 79 upon their helmets. This information went from Battalion, through Brigade, Division and Corps, to Army, who rather pooh-poohed the snipers' accuracy, as the 79th, when last heard of, had been upon the Russian front. Within a day or two, however, the Germans opposite the battalion to which these snipers belonged sent a patrol out of their trenches one misty morning. The patrol fell in with our scouts, who killed two and carried back the regulation identifications. These proved the sentries to be correct.

It was in the same Division that in one tour of duty the snipers reported the cap-bands of the Germans opposite as : (1) brown ; (2) yellow; (3) white. This again raised a doubt as to their accuracy; the matter was interesting, as it seemed possible that the trenches had been taken over by dismounted Uhlans. But before long the snipers were once again justified. A prisoner was taken, who acknowledged that the men of his unit had, under orders, covered the state badges on their caps with strips of tape wound round and round the brims. Prior to putting on this tape, he said, many of his comrades had dipped it in their coffee.

It is only fair to say that the sniping officer of the division in question was Lieut. Gray, and the exceeding skill of the officers and men under him may fairly be laid at his door.

There was in the trenches a very simple way of testing the accuracy of the sniper's observation. The various German States, Duchies or Kingdoms all wore two badges on their caps, one above the other, the higher being the Imperial badge and the lower the badge of the State. Thus, the Prussian badge is black and white, the Bavarian light blue and white ; the Saxon, green and white. These badges or, to be more correct, cockades, are not larger than a shilling, and the colours are in concentric rings. A series of experiments carried out at First Army School by the Staff and some of the best Lovat Scouts proved that these colours were indistinguisable with the best Ross telescope at a distance of more than 150 yards, except under the most favourable circumstances. So if ever a sniper (who, of course, knew what troops he was faced by) reported the colours of cockades when more than 150 yards from the enemy, it was at once clear that his imagination was too strong to admit of his useful employment with an observer's telescope. Another great duty of snipers was the blinding of the enemy. Thus, if the Germans bombarded any portion of our front, their artillery observers almost always did their work from the flank, where very often from the front line or from some other point of vantage they spotted and corrected the shell bursts of their gunners. On such occasions our snipers opposite both flanks of the bombarded area broke the periscopes of the German observers, and thus often succeeded in either rendering them blind, or forcing them to take risks.

When Germans retaliated and shot our periscopes, we had a number of dummies made, and by taking the entry and exit of the bullet through the back and front of these, we were able to spot many posts from which the Germans were firing. The result was that the enemy suffered casualties. It is, in fact, not too much to say that in these ways we were able from very early days to place the position of any sniper who troubled us, and, once placed, there were many methods by which the man could be rendered harmless.

Another point that was not without interest was the fact that occasionally, and apparently for no reason, the Germans sighted their rifles by firing at marks upon our parapets. If they did this in a high wind, it might have been possible that they were trying to get the correct wind allowance to put on their rifles ; but as they often did it, and it happened all along the line on a still morning, we felt we must seek some other explanation. Collaboration with Intelligence proved that this orgy of rifle sighting seemed to coincide with the relief by one battalion of another in the trenches. It was one of the many little straws which showed which way the wind was blowing.

The psychology of the different races of snipers was always interesting. The English were sound, exceedingly unimaginative, and very apt to take the most foolish and useless risks, showing their heads unnecessarily, and out of a kind of unthinking optimism. Nor did the death of their comrades cause them to keep their heads down, except in the particular place where a man had been killed. Unimaginativeness is a great quality in war, but when one is playing a very close game, in which no points can be given away, between skilled antagonists as we were doing in sniping, one sometimes wished for a little less wooden-headed " bravery" so-called and a little more finesse.

The Welsh were very good indeed, their 38th Division keeping a special sniper's book, and their sniping officer, Captain Johnson, was very able. I think that in early 1918, the snipers of this Division had accounted for 387 Germans in trench-warfare.

The Canadians, the Anzacs, and the Scottish Regiments were all splendid, many units showing an aggressiveness which had the greatest effect on the moral of the enemy. Of the Australians I had, to my deep regret, no experience, but they always had the name of being very good indeed.

The Americans were also fine shots, and thoroughly enjoyed their work, but my experience of them lay simply in teaching at the school, and I never had the opportunity of seeing them in action. Of the Germans as a whole one would say that, with certain brilliant exceptions, they were quite sound, but rather unenterprising, and that as far as the various tribes were concerned, the Bavarians were — better than the Prussians, while some Saxon units were really first-rate.

I remember once being in the trenches at Ploeg-steert Wood, where the Saxons were against us, and our fellows were talking about them being " good old fellows." All the same, it did not do to show the breadth of your forehead to the " good old fellows," for they were really admirable shots.

Somehow or other this idea of the " good old fellow " rather stuck in my mind, and I used to picture Fritz the sniper as a stout and careful middle-aged man, who sat in his steel box with a rifle, took no chances, and carried on his work like a respectable tradesman. This idea of the fat bearded sniper, however, was not supported by the telescope, through which I saw some of the most desperate and bedraggled-looking snipers that one could wish to see. Those who sometimes got outside their own lines were, however, I think, rather the " wild boys," and after we got rid of them the Germans fell back upon a kind of sober rifle fire which made up the main bulk of their sniping.

One point that was noticeable was the good focussing powers of the German snipers of certain regiments, who shot very well before dawn and towards dark. In the very crack Jager regiments, such regiments as were, I suppose, recruited from Rominten or Hubertusstock districts, where the great preserves of the Kaiser lay, and in which were a large percentage of Forest Guards, this was very noticeable. But for long distance work, and the higher art of observation, the Germans had nothing to touch our Lovat Scouts. This is natural enough when one comes to consider the dark forests in which the German Forest Guards live, and in which they keep on the alert for the slightest movement of deer or boar. Mostly game is seen within fifty or seventy yards, or even closer, in these sombre shades, and then it is only the twitching of an ear or the movement of an antler lifted in the gloaming. Compare the open Scottish hills. It was the telescope against the field-glass, and the telescope won every time. In fact, in all the time I was in the trenches, I never saw a German telescope, whereas I saw hundreds and hundreds of pairs of field-glasses.

Now the best field-glass cannot compare with the telescope. Anyone who has tried to count the points on the antlers of a stag will know this. I had a great deal of difficulty in convincing some of our officers who were used to field-glasses, of this fact, but there was near by the place at which I was quartered in early days the carved figure of a knight in armour standing on the top of a chateau. This knight had very large spurs, and I would ask student officers to try and count the rowels with their field-glasses. They never could do so. I would then hand them one of my beautiful Ross glasses, and there always came the invariable question, " Where can I get a glass like this ? "

The telescope sight, of course, made accurate shoot¬ing in the half-lights very much easier, and indeed for some valuable minutes after it had become too dark to use open sights the telescope sights still gave a clear definition. At night they were invaluable. With a large telescope sight which magnified five times, and which was very kindly lent me by Lady Graham of Arran, several of us succeeded in making a six-inch group on the target at a hundred yards by moonlight, and even by starlight once we made a two and a half-inch group. I tried hard to get an

issue of somewhat similar sights for night firing authorized, for when you think of the large amount of coming and going which continues all night behind an occupied trench, there is no doubt that plenty of targets are always presenting themselves. Even the Government issue of telescopic sights were quite useful at night, but their effect would have been many times increased had it been possible to fit them for this purpose with a large object glass.

On both sides thousands upon thousands of lives were saved by wind, since it was not easy to judge its strength in the trenches, and as the targets aimed at were usually only half a head, the very smallest error of judgment resulted in a miss. Once a bullet had whizzed by a German's ear within a few inches, a second exposure of the head was rarely made in the same place. Trench sniping was, in fact, as defined by Colonel Langford Lloyd, " the art of hitting a very small object straight off and without the advantage of a sighting shot."

At a certain spot in our lines not very far from Auchonvillers, known to fame as " Ocean Villas," a German sniper had done fell work. It is hard to say how many British lives he had taken, but his tally was not small. He lurked somewhere in the mass of heaps of earth, rusty wire and sandbags which there formed a strong point of the German line. There were twenty or thirty loopholes from which he might be firing. The problem was from which of these did his shots actually come ? The Germans had a trick of multiplying their loopholes in this fashion. Many steel plates were shoved up on the parapet in the most obvious positions. These were rarely shot through, but they were certainly sometimes used. The German argument must have been that if you have thirty loopholes, it is thirty to one against the particular one from which you fire being under observation at that particular moment.

On our side there was no loophole whatever covering the area in which this German sniper worked, and any attempt to spot his post had perforce to be done over the top of the parapet. As he was simply waiting and watching for people to look over, it was only a very hurried and cursory glance that could be taken. At length, however, the Hun was located by an officer, in the vicinity of two enormous steel plates set near the top of his parapet.

As I have said, there was no loophole upon our side, so orders were given that one should be put in during the night right opposite to those two big plates. The next morning it was hardly light when the German sniper shot into our new loophole, which was at once closed. The trap was now ready, and the officer whose duty it was to deal with the matter went one hundred yards down the trench to the right flank, while an assistant protruded the end of a black stick which he happened to have in his hand, keeping at the same time well to the side. At the same moment the officer on the flank shot at the right hand of the two big plates once, and then again. The bullets rang aloud upon the plates, and the German sniper at the second shot betrayed himself. Thinking as he did that the shots were fired from the open loophole opposite to him, he fired at it, and the gas from his rifle gave away, his position. The two big plates were, of course, dummies, and he was firing almost from ground level, and from an emplacement cleverly concealed by a mass of broken wire. The loophole was now shut for a moment or two, and then once again opened, the officer on the flank having moved to a position where he could command the German sniper's loophole. His cap had fallen off. He had a bald head. Once found, and unaware of the fact the sniper was soon dealt with.

One could relate very many such incidents, but they are rather grisly. Sooner or later nearly every troublesome German sniper met his fate.

But the duty of the sniper changed as the war went on. At first his job was to dominate the German snipers, destroy their moral, and make life secure for his own comrades. At the same time there was his Intelligence work. Later, as the warfare became more open, he proved his value over and over again in attack.

When a trench was taken, it was his duty to get out in front and (lying in a shell-hole) to keep the enemy heads down while his companions consolidated the newly-won position. When an advance was held up by a machine-gun, it was the sniper's business to put it out of action if he could, and the list of V.C.'s and D.C.M.'s, as well as thousands of deeds of nameless men, prove how often he was successful. In the last advance of the Canadian Corps, their very skilled sniping officer, Major Armstrong, told me that a single sniper put out of action a battery of 5.9 guns, shooting down one after another the German officer and men who served it a great piece of work, and one thoroughly worthy of General Currie's splendid Corps.

But the machine-gun was the sniper's special target. Once, of course, a machine-gun was spotted, or moved in the open, a single sniper was quite capable of putting it out of action. In fact, the sniper's duties were legion. He had to be a really high-class shot, a good and accurate observer, and a good judge of distance, wind and light.

Suffice it that in the more open warfare many a sniper killed his fifty Germans in a single day, and whether as a rifleman or scout, he bore a part more perilous than that of the rank and file of his comrades. If you who read this know a man who served his year or two in the sniping section of his battalion, you know one whom it is well that you should honour.

A position which was much used by German snipers is supposed to have been trees. This was the theme of many pictures in the illustrated papers, but as a matter of fact a high tree makes a wretched sniping post, and I rarely allowed one to be used on our side. The Germans, however, did extensively use the pollard willows which were so common a feature on the First Army front. We did not use them, as I have said, but we found that the German sense of humour appears to be much tickled by seeing, or thinking he sees, a Britisher falling out of a tree, and when our sniping became very good, and the enemy consequently shy of giving a target, a dummy in a tree worked by a rope sometimes caused Fritz and Hans to show themselves unwisely.

When the sniping was of high class on both sides, all kinds of ruses were employed to get the other side to give a target. But one had to be very careful not to go too far in this sort of work or trickery, lest a minenwerfer should take his part in the duel.

From time to time wild geese crossed the trenches in the winter, and their appearance was usually a signal for a fusillade in which every rifle and machine-gun that could be brought to bear on both sides took part. Very rarely was one brought down, though it is possible that along the whole front in the years of war a dozen may have been killed. One in particular, on a wild and stormy evening, was shot by the British and fell in the German lines. The enemy the next day hoisted a sign on which was painted in English the words : " So many thanks ! "—which was indeed hard to bear !

There is another incident into which birds also came which occurred on the Brick-stacks front of the First Army. It was when our sniping had reached its high-water mark in the nth Corps. Not very long before we had been dominated on this front, but the 33rd Division had put all that right.

One day Lieut. Gray was coming down the trenches on a tour of inspection, when he found a private soldier with five partridges lying before him on the fire step.

" How did you get them ? " said Gray.

" Shot them, sir."

" Yes, but I mean how did you get their bodies ?"

" Crawled out, sir, and picked them up."

" By daylight, and in full view of the Germans ? "

" Yes, sir. It's all right, sir ; they never shoot now."

Gray gave the private in question a good dressing-down, but the incident was not without its significance.

One day in 1915 I was knocking about on the top of Hill 63 with a telescope. The edge of Ploegsteert Wood abuts upon this hill, and as I came up I saw an old cock pheasant walking about. At that moment a shell burst very close to him. He was not hit, but he was certainly very much dazed, for he stood stupidly watching the fumes rising from the cavity, and had it not been for the strict orders concerning game—and the probable arrival of more shells—I could easily have captured him; but after a few moments, during which he sat with his feathers all fluffed out, he gathered himself together and disappeared into the nearest thicket.

I was always very much afraid all through the war that, having started poison gas, the Germans might start using shot guns loaded with buckshot for work between the trenches. Had they done so, patrolling would have become a horrible business; but I suppose that they were restrained by the fact either that such weapons are not allowed by the Geneva Convention, or that the British Isles have such a supply of shot guns and cartridges that the advantage would not remain long upon their side. As it was, things were much more satisfactory, for there was plenty of excitement out in No Man's Land, what with machine-gun bullets and rifle fire, without the added horror of a charge of small shot in the face.

I have touched on the work of observers in the front line in this chapter, but it will be more fully considered in the next upon the subject of Observation, to which this side of the sniper's work really belongs.