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Updated: June 5, 2025
Calling a private, he said testily: "Go out and get that sniper." The man was gone for some time, but he eventually returned with Fritz. He had not got him in, however, before he began to belabor him fiercely. "What are you beating up that Hun for?" asked a comrade. "He missed the Colonel," whispered the other.
Trembling with excitement he focussed his telescope on the bush, and even as he did so, he knew his vigil was over. The thing which up to that moment he had taken for a log was a man the man, the sniper. He could see the faint outline of his face, now that his attention was drawn to it, and with infinite care he drew a bead on the centre of it.
But though those bullets pecked constantly at the small parties or at stragglers of the night's attack hopping back from advanced shell-holes, the little procession with the flag passed through unharmed. If the sniper saw it he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else. We made our way back, when we went, across a hill-side literally flayed of all its covering.
You can still smell the Dardanelles expedition, and tread in old footsteps which hardly have been worn away. It is an astonishing position, dominated by vast inaccessible ridges. Leaving the so-aptly named "Dead Man's Gully" on the left, you look up to the "Sphinx," that perfect position of the sniper, climb to "Battleship Hill," and then to Chunuk Bair.
White smoke from many bursting Turkish shells mingled with the heavy black pall from the discharging broadsides. The bombardment continued for some time, and Mac at length returned to his neglected breakfast preparations, his going hastened by the fact that, carelessly exposing his head, he had attracted the attentions of a sniper.
As we moved forward and lay down we could hear the thudding of the picks as they were driven into the ground, and from somewhere in the darkness ahead the plick-plock of the sniper began. Captain H , our new company commander, passed down the line to warn us to count our men and see that all bayonets were fixed and magazines loaded.
Applying a first-aid dressing to the best of his ability, Wilmshurst prepared to "grin and bear it." He realised that developments would be mostly a contest of patience. The sniper was anxious to know the actual result of his shot, but too cautious to close until he felt certain that he had killed his victim.
I bit all right and asked him why the sniper was, punished for killing an English general. With a smile he replied: "Well, you see, if all the English generals were killed, there would be no one left to make costly mistakes." I shut him up, he was getting too fresh for a prisoner. After a while he winked at me and I winked back, then the escort came to take the prisoners to the rear.
In Tom's visions of the great war there had been no picture of the sniper, that single remnant of romantic and adventurous warfare, in all the roar and clangor of the horrible modern fighting apparatus. He had seen American boys herded onto great ships by thousands; and, marching and eating and drilling in thousands, they had seemed like a great machine.
We were out at the support billets on Christmas Day, and after working all night we were much disgusted when our Sergeant came in where we were sleeping and told us we had to go up to the lines with some supplies. However, they gave us an issue of rum, and we started out. We had made our trip and were on the road back when a sniper caught sight of us.
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