H. Hesketh-Prichard

“ Conscientiousness is a great quality in an officer, but in the Sniping, Scouting and Observation Officer something more was needed. To obtain success, real success, it was necessary that his should be a labour of love. He must think and dream of his work at all hours and all times, and it was wonderful how many came to do this. In the battalion the Intelligence and Sniping officer had always a sporting job, and if he suffered in promotion (as do nearly all specialists in any great Army) yet he had the compensations which come to an artist in love with his work. ”

“ Certainly many a German owed his life in those earlier days to the fact that so many of the telescopic-sighted rifles in the British Expeditionary Force were incorrectly sighted to the hold of the men using them. By this I mean that some men hold tightly and some men hold loosely, and there may be a difference at a hundred yards of six inches in the shooting of the same rifle in different hands. To hand over the rifle as “trench stores,” in which case it would be shot by different men of different battalions, was simply to do away with the accuracy which formed its only asset. ”

“ There are hundreds of such men in the Lovat Scouts, but then, of course, the whole trend of their lives is towards observation, skilled movement, and accuracy. The man who has spent twenty years on the hill, and who has counted the points on a thousand stags, who knows the difference between every track that he sees in a corrie, and who is never far from his telescope, is, when he goes to war, simply carrying into another sphere the normal activities of his life. ”

“ A scout may, in a single two hours of his life, be a sniper, an observer, and the old-fashioned scout who has to go out to find out things at close range. He has to be essentially an individualist capable of seeing and seizing his opportunity. ”

“ The chances of hitting a German head at six hundred yards with a telescope sight, if there is any wind blowing at all, are not great, for, as I have repeatedly said, a sighting shot is not possible, and I came to the conclusion that continual popping away with telescopic-sighted rifles at six hundred yards simply wore out their barrels. After all, a rifle only lasts at its highest efficiency for, in certain cases, as few as five hundred rounds, and every shot taken through a telescope-sighted rifle shortens the life of the barrel. ”

“ If your trench is dominated by enemy snipers, life in it is really a very hard thing, and moral must inevitably suffer. In many parts of the line all through France and Belgium the enemy, who were organized at a much earlier period than we, certainly did dominate us. Each regiment and most soldiers who have been to France will remember some particular spot where they will say the German sniping was more deadly than elsewhere, but the truth of the matter is that in the middle of 1915 we were undergoing almost everywhere a severe gruelling, to say the least of it. ”

“ As he watched, Red remembered the words of the Corps Commander: “There is no No Man’s Land. It must be our land right up to the enemy trenches.” That was an ideal to live up to. But stare now as he would, and as he continued to do for an hour, he saw nothing, could see nothing of Wilibald. Broken wire, shell holes, sandbags, pulverized bricks and mortar, men lying in queer positions, men whose ragged tunics the evening wind stirred strangely, men who would never move again. ”

“ I think these days as the guest of the various Corps Commanders of the First Army—for I was passed on from the 11th Corps to the 3rd, and from the 3rd to the 1st—were the best days I had in France, for the extraordinary keenness in the First Army was very marked. It was here that I had to go through the ordeal of having to lecture to the Guards Divisional Staff and Snipers at nine o’clock in the morning. In lecturing, even on an interesting subject like sniping, it has always seemed to me much easier to be successful in a warm room at five o’clock rather than in a cold one at nine. ”

“ To take a telescope sight off a rifle occupies not two seconds of time, and to think that a sniper could or would ever do rapid fire through a telescope sight, or need to load with a clip, shows nothing short of incredible ignorance. ”

“ In training glassmen, one wonderfully soon realized how impossible it was to teach any man to use his telescope skilfully who had not been accustomed to it from early youth. Every soldier can, of course, be taught which end to look through, and how to focus, and such details, but these men who began late in life never got the same value from their glasses as did the gillies and the stalkers, and from the point of view of accuracy they were in no way comparable. ”

“ It is wonderful what can be done in a single week by sixteen accurate shots along the length of line held by a battalion. You must understand also that the success of the German sniping rested largely upon the deeds of certain crack snipers, who thoroughly understood their work, and who each one of them caused us heavy casualties. The first work to be done in the trenches was the organized annihilation of these skilled German snipers, and I think this was the easier in that they had it their own way for so long. ”

“ The smallest of big game animals did not present so small a mark as the German head, so that sniping became the highest and most difficult of all forms of rifle shooting. At it, every good target shot, though always useful, was not necessarily successful, for speed was only less necessary than accuracy, and no sniper could be considered worthy of the name who could not get off his shot within two seconds of sighting his target. ”

“ Sometimes the officers of the staff or the Lovat Scouts attempted to crawl out of the German trench without being seen, and on one occasion two Lovat battle observers who were resting at the school crawled clean round an officer class unseen, and took them in the rear. This is an easy enough thing to do when the ground is favourable, but our trenches had been very carefully sited, so that there were at least three or four spots in which a man crawling was well within view, and in passing across these he had to exercise the most infinite care if he wished to obtain success. ”

“ In fact, the romance of observation was endless, forming, as it did, one of the more human phases of the world-war, for here, at least, an observer’s life was often dependent upon his own skill. Observers often lay in full view, their lives depending upon quiescence and their art of blending with the background.
When, at a later date, there was an issue in the British Army of sniping robes for the use of snipers125 and observers—robes which tallied with any background and were ornamented with all kinds of dazzle painting—there was a tendency to send snipers and observers out in front. ”

“ I, it is absolutely essential that the use of the telescope should be taught from the stalking or big-game point of view. If we had one Officer teaching it in every battalion of our Army in France, we should kill a lot of Germans, and not only this but the task of Intelligence Officers would be greatly facilitated. With four good telescopes on every battalion front, very little can happen in the enemy line without our knowing it. There are a good many telescopes in France. ”

“ At the school we gave six different strengths of wind, gentle, moderate, fresh, strong, very strong, and gale, and it was, of course, in the judging of the gentle, moderate and fresh, that the difficulties lay. Our range had this advantage, that it was a good one on which to teach wind allowance by letting the men practise for themselves, for there was almost always a wind blowing.
Night firing and observation by moonlight, as well as many other schemes which the reader who is interested can see for himself in the curriculum which is set out in the appendix, took up the rest of our time ”

“ To spot a hostile machine-gun emplacement was one of the most valuable services a front-line observer could render, since of course a single machine-gun can hold up an attack and inflict great casualties. Therefore, when a machine-gun emplacement was spotted it was not necessarily put out of action at once, but its map reference was noted and sent to Intelligence, where it was filed, and action taken by the divisional artillery at the correct time, usually just before a raid or an attack. ”

“ PART I Care of Arms, Grouping and Range Practices:
It is essential that the Sniper shall have a really clean rifle if he is to obtain the extreme accuracy that is required of him. By a clean rifle I mean a rifle in the cleaning of which not only have all the normal precautions been taken, but, in addition, the bore has received a very high polish. This high polish is of great importance to accurate shooting, and to be efficient as a Sniper you must be far more accurate than the average Service Shot. Hence the necessity for going rather deeply into Care of Arms. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The observer cannot observe in his gas mask, so that gas shells are his particular enemy, and in many of the later attacks the Germans at once drenched all possible observation posts with gas.
But, as I say, the observer is the eye of the High Command. Far away a General and his Chief of Staff are looking at a map. An orderly enters and hands over a flimsy to the Chief of Staff. He reads out the message. The General gives a sigh of relief. He knows now that the danger spot is behind the remnants of the gallant battalions of the 381st Brigade. ”

“ From the ruined house or the field of decaying roots, sometimes resting their rifles on the bodies of the dead, they sent forth a plague of head-wounds into the British lines. Their marks were small, but when they hit they usually killed their man, and the hardiest soldier turned sick when he saw the effect of the pointed German bullet, which was apt to keyhole so that the little hole in the forehead where it entered often became a huge tear, the size of a man’s fist, on the other side of the stricken man’s head. ”

“ The sniper, those who held this view said, was a man whose first duty was offensive action against the enemy, whereas a scout’s duty was not to fight, but to obtain information. We at the school could never see it in this light, for there must be occasions when a scout must fight to get his information back, or indeed, to obtain it, and it seemed futile that in the morning a man should ask himself, “Am I to-day a sniper or a scout?” ”

“ The use of snipers in attack is another point. If you have a man who can hit a model of a human head once in every 2 shots at 400 yards—and I will undertake to get most men up to this standard who can shoot decently—we shall kill some machine gunners in our next advance. Also when a German is shooting at our troops coming down a road through an aperture made by the removal of a brick from a wall, as they have often done, how useful to have a fellow who can put a bullet through the aperture. ”

“ It is here that telescope sights help us, but telescope sights in the hands of a man who does not thoroughly understand them are utterly useless. I have had a great many through my hands, and in every ten I have had to correct about six after they have been in the trenches a short time. I wish every battalion had an Officer who could correct and shoot telescopic sights. It is very important that he should be thoroughly knowledgeable, because a rifle barrel must not have too many shots fired through it. ”

“ Many times officers who ought to have known better advocated the shooting away of a mass of ammunition through telescope-sighted rifles at ranges of five or six hundred yards. It was hard to make these officers realize that the sole value of a telescopic rifle lay in its extreme accuracy, and that if the rifle were continually fired through, the barrel would become worn, and the best shot in the world, were he using it, would find his group spreading ever more widely upon the target. ”

“ It is inconceivable that a skilled hunter in a position of command should ever allow his men to suffer as our men sometimes did in France. It was all so simple and so obvious. The Canadian Division and, later, the Canadian Corps was full of officers who understood how to deal with the German sniper, and early in the war there were Canadian snipers who were told off to this duty, and some of them were extraordinarily successful. Corporal, afterwards Lieutenant, Christie, of the P.P.C.L.I., was one of the individual pioneers of sniping. ”

“ I usually lie in front watching, and it is rarely that, if I shot straight, I should not be able to kill or wound nine of every ten men who open them. Loopholes should, of course, be opened from the side, and a cap badge exposed before they are looked through. If the German does not fire for 75 seconds, one may conclude that it is fairly safe. These little simple-sounding precautions can save so many lives.
I cannot help feeling that sniping, even in these days of many specialists, should be organized and improved. My aim has always been to work in with battalions. ”

“ In sniping, as the movement grew and sections were formed, one relied to an enormous extent upon the skill of the section to which the individual sniper belonged. A really first-rate man in a bad section was thrown away. First-rate men under a moderate officer were thrown away, and, worse than all, a good section under a good officer, who were relieved by the slack and poor section of another battalion, often suffered heavy casualties through no fault of their own. ”