When actually at the firing point, a soldier is taught that he must “keep his rifle pointing up the range,” for accidents happen easily, and, in spite of the extreme caution of officers and instructors, hardly a year goes by without some accidental shooting to record. The wonder is not that this sort of thing happens, but that it does not happen more often, for, until a soldier has undergone active service and seen how easily fatal results are produced with a rifle, it seems impossible to make him understand the danger attaching to careless use of the weapon. One may find a man, so long as he is not being watched, calmly loading a rifle and closing the bolt with the muzzle pointed at the ear of a comrade; it is not a frequent occurrence, but it happens, all the same. And, in consequence, accidents happen. The range and the annual course are productive of a good deal of amusement, at times. There is a story of an officer who pointed out to a man that every shot he was firing was going three feet to the right of the target, and who, after having pointed this out several times, at last ordered the man to stop firing while he telephoned up to the butts and ordered that that particular target should be moved three feet to the right. Whether the result justified the change is not recorded. Cases are not uncommon in which a man fires on the wrong target by mistake, especially at the long ranges, and there is at least one well-authenticated case of a man who put all his seven shots on to the next man’s target, and of course scored nothing for himself. For the law of the range is that if a man plants a shot on another man’s target, the other man gets the benefit of the points scored by that shot. The markers in the butts must mark up what they see, for if they were compelled to go by instructions from the firing point and had to disregard the evidence of the targets, a musketry course would be an extremely complicated business, and would last for ever. One oft-told story is that of the recruit who sent shot after shot over the back of the butts, in spite of the repeated instructions of the musketry instructor to take a lower aim. At last, probably being tired of being told to aim low, the recruit dropped his rifle muzzle to such an extent that the bullet struck the ground about half-way up the range and went on its course as a whizzing ricochet. “Missed again!” said the instructor in disgust. “Yes,” said the recruit, “but I reckon the target felt a draught that time, anyhow.”