“U--u--u--gh,” I shuddered, “it’s no good keeping the men on in this”; so, putting my whiskey-bottle full of rum in my haversack, I set off up Old Kent Road to visit my posts and withdraw the men _pro tem_. I expected to find the fellows unutterably cold, shrivelled up, and bored. To my surprise, at No. 1 post Thomas and Everton were in a state of huge excitement, eyes glowing, and faces full of life. There seemed to be a great rivalry, too, for the possession of the rifle. For the snipers always worked in pairs: a man cannot gaze out at the opposing lines with acute interest for more than about half an hour on end; so I used to work them by pairs, and give them shifts according to the weather. In summer you could put a pair on for four hours, and they would work well, taking half-hour shifts; but in cold weather two hours was quite enough. “We’ve got them, sir,” from 75 Thomas; “they was working in the trench over there--by all them blue sand-bags, sir--four of them, sir----” “Yes, and I saw him throw up his arms, sir,” put in Everton, excited for the first time I have ever seen him, and trying to push Thomas out of the box, and have another look. But Thomas would not be pushed. “Splendid,” I said: “by Jove, that’s good work. Can I see?” But it was snowing hard, and I could see very little. I tried the telescope. “Put it right up to your eye, sir,” said Thomas, forgetting that I had myself taught him this in billets as he vainly tried to see through it holding it about four inches from his face, and declaring that he could see everything just as well with his own eyes! “Yes, I think I see where you mean,” said I; “up by that sand-bag dump. There’s a mine-shaft there, and they were probably some of their R.E.’s piling up sand-bags, or emptying them out. I believe that is what they usually do now, fill the sand-bags below in their galleries, bring them up, empty them, and use the same ones again.” Thomas and Everton gaped at this. It had not occurred to them to consider that the Boche had R.E.’s. They were of the unimaginative class of snipers, who “saw, did, and reported,” and on the whole I preferred them to those who saw, and immediately “concluded.” For their conclusions were usually wrong. To men like Thomas I was, I think, looked upon as one who had some slightly supernatural knowledge of the German lines; he did not realise that by careful compass-bearings I knew the exact ground visible from his post, and that my map of the German lines, showing every trench as revealed by aeroplane photographs, was accurate to a yard. He was like a retriever, who keeps to heel, noses out his bird with unerring skill, and brings it in with the softest of mouths; yet the cunning and strategy he leaves to his master, who is decidedly his inferior in nose and mouth. So 75 Thomas could see and shoot far better than I; but it was I who thought out the strategy of the shoot.