Your body cannot be in repose at the instant you fire unless you have your sling properly adjusted, unless you are reasonably comfortable (not constrained), and unless you, temporarily, stop breathing. Your body must be, for an instant, a vise. Any trivial thing such as a puff of wind, a jerk of the trigger, or a noise near you, will ordinarily change your hold and throw you off the bull's-eye. Suppose you are making a poor score. What is the trouble? In the first place don't blame it on the rifle or the ammunition. Assume full responsibility yourself. You are the responsible party. Practise a great deal and see if you can locate the fault. If you cannot, your captain will assist you. When we go from gallery practice to the target range, where we fire the service rifle with the service charge, we find a great difference in the recoil of the rifle and in the sound. The good Lord has made our muscles and nervous system to react automatically at danger or anything connected with it. That is probably why we shudder and close our eyes when a door is slammed very near to us. But sound, unless we get too close, does not hurt any one, and we should steel our nerves to remember that fact when we are firing. We also know that there is going to be a certain amount of recoil of the rifle. But if you will hold your sling as you have been instructed, if you will provide yourself with proper elbow and shoulder padding, the authors of this text assure you that you will experience no pain or harm from the recoil. It is their judgment that if you are healthy and can see and will go on the range with your jaws set to fire with anything like your gallery practice coolness, and calmness, you will qualify. Your greatest stumbling block will be your rapid fire. This is where you fire a definite number of shots in a limited time. And this is where you will experience the extreme amount of nervousness. When you return from firing your first score at rapid fire, and have had time to think calmly over your actions, you will probably realize that your nerves were pitched up in G and that you did a number of foolish things. You should realize that you are not an exceptional man. Ninety-nine out of every hundred normal, virile men are more or less nervous when they first step up for rapid fire. Practice and will power are the correctives. Let us suppose that you have ten shots to fire in two minutes. If you fire your ten shots in one minute it is plain that you return unused one minute given to you. This minute may have been of great use to you in getting closer to the bull's-eye. If you fire at the rate of ten shots in three minutes, it is plain that when your two minutes shall have expired you have missed the opportunity of firing four times at the bull's-eye. Get one of your bunkies to go back of your tent and time you. Then swap about and you hold the watch for him. Try to make of yourself a machine that finishes the ten shots just before the time expires.