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Updated: June 6, 2025
He had arrived with a convoy the night before, after much travel in ambulances by land and sea. If he had been a walking case, he might have taken more interest in things; but the sniper's bullet in his thigh had touched the bone, and in spite of being carried most tenderly about like a baby, he had suffered great pain and longed for nothing and thought of nothing but a permanent resting-place.
Lieutenant Le Blanc Smith, of Trinity, machine-gun officer, was struck in the forehead by a sniper's bullet while reconnoitring. His General and brother officers write: He was a very fine young officer.... Every one loved him.... His men would do anything for him....
About four o'clock we received the bad news that Captain John MacDonald had been killed shot through the head by a sniper's bullet in the front trench which his company was still assisting to hold.
The men had ceased to watch for Henri over the parapet, and his brave deeds had become fireside tales, to be told at home, if ever there were to be homes again for them. Then one night Henri came back came as he had gone, out of the shadows that had swallowed him up; came without so much as the sound of a sniper's rifle to herald him.
"Dead as mutton," reported Wilmshurst, after bringing his glasses to bear upon the ill-starred Hun. "He nearly had me, though," he soliloquised, tentatively fingering the double perforation in his helmet. There was no lack of volunteers to examine the sniper's lair.
So hurried was their exit when faced by British bayonets that they left behind them in the trench quite a number of articles most useful to us such as saws, sniper's rifles mounted on tripod stands, haversacks, and a quantity of other equipment, also a very fine selection of cigars, which came as quite a godsend to us.
It was of course an old Turkish defence running crosswise along the great backbone of the Sirt. I knew now that I was nearing the bay, for most of these trenches overlooked the beach. There was a white object about ten yards from me. What it was I could not tell, and a quiver of fear ran through me and threw off the awful sleepiness of fatigue. Was it a Turkish sniper's shirt?
Thus we had "Moated Grange," "Bus House," "Shelley Farm," "Beggar's Rest," "Dead Dog Farm," "Sniper's Barn," "Captain's Post," "Maple Copse," the "White Château" and the "Red Château," "Dead Horse Corner," "White Horse Cellars" and so on, indefinitely. "Scottish Wood" was so named for the London Scottish who made a famous charge there in the early part of the war.
A silence of some length might supervene, in which one would only hear the gentle rustling of the leaves; then suddenly, far away on the right, a faint surging roar can be heard, and then louder and louder. "Wind up over there." Then, gradually, silence would assert itself once more and leave you with nothing but the rustling leaves and the crack of the sniper's rifle on the Messines ridge.
In every position you take over there are a certain number of myths which when you go out you carefully repeat to the incoming battalion; and the tale seldom loses in the telling. These are handed down to posterity in naming new field-works; hence the frequency of "Suicide Alley," "Sniper's Cross-roads," "Dead Man's Corner," &c, &c.
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