Sniping in France by H. Hesketh-Prichard

Author:H. Hesketh-Prichard
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781440089169
Publisher: Forgotten Books
Published: 2010-03-08T13:00:00+00:00

In the morning, when the light was bad owing to the position of the sun, it was very hard to spot the shell hole, and the beam was invisible, but one day when the light was very good in the afternoon, the glass revealed five bricks standing on this broken beam. Natural enough—but not quite so natural when the next day the five bricks had changed their position. On the first day four had been lying along the beam at full length and one was set upon its end. On the second day a second had adopted the erect position.

Late in the afternoon of that clear day the officer who had observed and who was taking interest in the five bricks saw through his 30-power glass a German hand moving the bricks and the light glint on a pair of German field-glasses levelled amongst them.

The second shell from our gunners removed for ever that post of Beaumont Hamel.

That was one side of the game.

The other was when your own post got given away —as it sometimes did—usually by the flash of a glass in some unskilled hands, by aeroplane photographs, or by some idiot approaching the post when the light allowed of good observation from the German line. Then the first news you had of it was the arrival of the German shells. Followed either the decision to stick it, or the climb, during the later stages of the war in a gas mask, down the ladder and a dash for the nearest dug-out.

Once on a certain famous ridge riddled with our observation posts, I can remember finding a path leading to every post clear in the new fallen snow, and a German aeroplane imminent overhead. Now supposing that plane happened to be a photographic plane, as it most probably was, the whole of the posts would be given away as clearly as if we had sent a map across with them marked upon it.

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