That night the machine-gun started popping as usual, when suddenly a salvo of whizz-bangs screamed over, and H.E.’s joined in the game. All round and about the little grey-roofed house flickered the flashes of bursting shells. Then the enemy retaliated, and for a quarter of an hour “a certain liveliness prevailed.” Then came peace. But there was no sound all night of a machine-gun popping from Fricourt village; on the other hand, our machine-guns had taken up the tune, with short bursts of overhead fire, searching for those Boche ration carts. And in the morning the grey-roofed cottage appeared with two tiles left on the right-hand bottom corner of the roof, and the front wall had a huge gap in it big enough to act as a mouth for fifty machine-guns. Only Morgan was disappointed: all marks of the sausages had been cleared away before dawn! After all, are not the Germans pre-eminently a tidy people? III Private Ellis had hard blue eyes that looked at you, and looked, and went on looking; they always reminded me of the colour of the sea when a north wind is blowing and the blue is hard and bright. I have seen two other pairs of eyes like them. One belonged to Captain Jefferies, the big game shooter, who lectured on Sniping at the Third Army School. The other pair were the property of a sergeant I met this week for the first time. “Are you a marksman?” I asked him. “Yes, sir! Always a marksman, sir.” There is no mistaking those eyes. They are the eyes of a man who has used them all his life, and found them grow steadier and surer every year. They are essentially the eyes of a man who can watch, watch, watch all day, and not get tired of watching; and they were the eyes of my best sniper. For Private Ellis had all the instincts of a cunning hunter. I had no need to tell him to keep his telescope well inside the loophole, lest the sun should catch on the glass; no need to remind him to stuff a bit of sand-bag in the loophole when he left the post unoccupied. He never forgot to let the sand-bag curtain drop behind him as he entered the box, to prevent light coming into it and showing white through a loophole set in dark earth. There was no need either to make sure that he understood the telescopic sights on his rifle; and there was no need to tell him that the Boches were clever people. He never under-estimated his foe.