From that time on, I "lived" in Sniper's Barn. It made no difference
whether the battalion was in the front line or in billets, I was there
for a purpose and I accomplished it. When the guns were in the front
or in support, we had one mounted in the hedge and kept the rifle
handy. Bouchard, with a large telescope, and I with my binoculars,
scanned everything along the enemy's front and behind his lines. We
knew the ranges, to an inch. If one or two men showed, I used the
rifle; if a larger number, the machine gun.
Prior to this time, during all the very bad weather, we had ample
opportunities to shoot individual Germans from our Sniper's Barn
position but had refrained because our own men were also necessarily
exposing themselves daily, and to have started a sniping campaign
would have done us no particular good and would certainly have
resulted in additional deaths on our side. It seems that the troops
opposed to us up to this time had been Saxons who were quite well
satisfied to leave us alone provided we would do the same by them. Of
course we did shoot them occasionally when they became too careless
and exposed themselves in groups, but that was perfectly legitimate
machine-gun work and taught them a well-needed lesson. Now, however, a
different breed of Huns had come in and they had started the dirty
work. They were Bavarians alternating with Marines, and we soon
learned that for genuine low-down cussedness the Marine had them all
beaten, although the Bavarians and Prussians were pretty bad.
When we first began on them it was no unusual occurrence to have from
ten to twenty good open shots a day. The ranges averaged about six
hundred yards and as I was using a specially targeted Ross rifle,
equipped with the latest Warner & Swazey sight, and as I had spent
many years in learning the finer points of military rifle shooting, I
am very much afraid that some of them got hurt. For about a month we
kept it up, the "hunting" getting poorer every day until finally the
few German snipers working along the front were safely ensconced in
carefully prepared dug-outs. A boche cap above the parapet was a rare
sight, but we had our hundred, all right; and then some; for, as
Bouchard said: "We'd better get a little pay, in advance before they
'bump _us_ off.'"
Several times in later days similar events occurred and in each case
swift and terrible retribution was meted out to the criminal enemy.
They shot down our stretcher-bearers, engaged in their noble work of
trying to save the wounded, but we took bloody toll from them whenever
this occurred, using unusual methods and taking desperate chances,
sometimes, to drive the lesson home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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