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Updated: June 6, 2025
On June the twenty-second, nineteen hundred and fifteen, you saw me off from Victoria of hateful memory. I have been home six or seven times in the interval, but somehow or other have always missed you. I was appalled when I heard you had joined. God knows we need such brains as yours, but they would be wasted on the Somme; and genius is too rare to be exposed to the sniper's bullet.
He went limp suddenly and slid out of Hollister's grasp. And they let him lie, a dead man beside the dead woman on the floor. They stood up themselves and stared at the bodies with that strange incredulity men sometimes feel in the face of sudden death. Both Lawanne and Hollister were familiar with death, death by the sniper's bullet, by machine gun and shell, by bayonet and poison gas.
First, F. Eastwood, M.M., of "C" Company, a soldier who had scarcely missed a day since the beginning, was shot through the head and killed outside "C" Company Headquarters in Northampton trench. A few nights later, on the 30th December, Lieut. P. Measures, commanding "B" Company, was sniped while fixing a sniper's post in the front line, and also killed instantly.
A roar and some sandbags and lumps of chalk flew in all directions, while fragments pattered down on Reginald out of the sky. "Hope to God they don't come any closer," he muttered, watching the next rum jar shoot up. "Anyway, I've marked the place they're coming from." Then his eyes came back to the sniper's locality, and as they did so a quiver of excitement ran through him.
One morning I was showing him the remains of some Germans I had blown up, and in his eagerness he stuck his head and shoulders, red tabs and all, over the trenches, when ping! a sniper's bullet struck the bag within an inch of his head and covered him with dirt. "Pompey" roared with laughter and was in good humor for the rest of the day.
After going over all the ground back of our lines, I decided to try the experiment of placing the gun in a small hedge which ran across the lower end of an old garden or orchard, in front of Sniper's Barn; that is, on the side toward the enemy.
You could get vegetables from the Chinaman, who continued to cultivate onions, cabbages, potatoes, and melons in the market-gardens about the town, imperturbable under shot and shell, his large straw hat affording an admirable target from the Boer sniper's point of view, as metaphorically he gathered his fat harvest of dollars from the soil.
Nothing was to be heard except the occasional crack of the sniper's shot, the dripping of the rain, and the low murmur of voices from the outer cave. In the narrow space beside me lay my equipment; revolver, and a sodden packet of cigarettes. Everything damp, cold and dark; candle-end guttering.
But they still afforded shelter from bursting shrapnel or a sniper's bullet, and the boys stood behind them for a few moments while they listened intently for any sound that might betray the presence of an enemy patrol, prowling about on an errand similar to their own. But nothing suspicious developed, and, reassured, they again, at a signal from their leader, moved forward.
For it was a sniper's paradise, as the victims could they have spoken would have testified. As it was they lay there lightly buried, and the same fool men made the same fool mistakes and came and joined them. As I say, it was a sniper's paradise. . . . Into this abode of joy, then, came the very superior young "gentleman."
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