SNIPER'S 31st HUN.

Bruce Herald, Volume LII, Issue 23, 23 March 1916, Page 3

SNIPER'S 31st HUN.

' CANADIANS' NO MAN'S LAND. WEATHER-COCK CAS WARNING. As the mist and "rain descended and the horizon shrank from 10 miles to ono we journeyed to the. trenches in the plain, where a horizon from 200 to 300 yards is all tliat a man needs (writes the special correspondent of 'The Daily Mail' from General Headquarters in France). Down there in "the common crofts" certain advantages belong to thek weather. Where the" communication trench is a slough you may clamber on to the bank and*try to feel as confident as your guide that the enemy will neither see you nor infer you. \ou take shortcuts here and there, trusting that •tiltmember of the working party is quite accurate when lie assures you that the interval is "dead gi-Qund for bullets,"" though the idiom has an uncomely sound. ' To-day a comforting though rather ominous silence is over everything; and when at last we reach" .the front-line trench the crack of a sniper's rifle just round the traverse sounds as loud a& a battery. ; But the trenches themselves give every confidence. A general who had been-through them a day or two earlier had told the Canadians that they were the best in „ the line. They were certainly the best I had yet seen. Neat drains from No Man's Land flowed out under the duck-boarding that everywhere, served as flooring. Even the slither of this stoneless mud-clay had been kept tame by wire and wood; and millions of sandbags were piled in the newest and most scientific manner.

As I stopped leaning up against "the loafer-burnished wall," while someone else was .peering through a spy-hole, I became aware of a sort of rabbit-nole below me. The inmate, with the usual quick Canadian,hospitality, offered me the freedom of his dwelling. He could not receive the whole of his guest: there was not room for that. 1 considered the invitation as extending to my head, and that could enter far enough to see and appreciate the whole of the Dutch interior. The owner sat low before a tiny stove, Unci he held in his hand a welMathered. shaving brush. His cheeriness, conspicuous even in this cheery group, was due perhaps to the prospect of a clean shave, as the preface to a savour lunch, whose fumes already made #i pleasant accompaniment to the toilet. MEN'S LIVELY SPIRIT. It is difficult at such a moment to understand and feel the hardship and danger of this daily warfare. The men make you forget it, so natural and jolly they are, though each is in some sense "suppositus cineri doloso" (a paraphrase of Horace, who was thinking of the fire "beneath the treacherous lava crust") is treading on a mine. Everyone looks at home. From the next dugout I pass came the gay whistle of "Susanne, Susanne, we love you to a man." On the back wall at the traverse beyond was a little handmade weathercock, such as you«see in a village garden at home. Who would ever'have thought that it was put up to indicate the winds favorable to a Hun gas attack? „ The gongs fixed to the walls here aaid there have a ' domestic look, though they are made of empty shell cases. But most of all the household ways of the men and their lively spirit keep aloof the sense of danger and death. Yet they never for a minute lack a reminder.

There, lying on a mud heap, are two French rilles dug up yesterday, relics of a stubborn .fight on this same spot a year ago. The place is fathom-deep in the crudest form of war record; Here and there, *in the area of the trench and at its edges, rough circles and crosses mark the burial spot of the often nameless dead. And you may see more direct evidence than this. Nor can the most buoyant talk oiiitd avoid the tale of losses and scenes still, printed on the mind and distinct' on the retina. In spite of all no one is less morbid-than the man who fights daily. He thinks first and last of his job; and great thinkers have reached no sounder philosophy or source of comfort. ' The day, was remaining quiet as well 'as thick. The mist, now turned to rain, seemed to have blanketed the animosity 6 of guns and grenades, always excepting the rifle of the sniper. And sniping, the most interesting occupation, is also the favorite theme' of trench conversation, as may easily be understood. In this very trench a single sniper had just earned a fewdays' leave after killing liis 31st German. They were all down in the note-" book as certainties with details. Some, of course, were just lucky shots/ THE NEIW " CANADA!" ; Many are the tales, of Che skill of one particular German sniper. His prowess was even shown off to visitors, as if he were a recognised attraction, of the locality. "Just you watch liim," a man would say, and thereupon raise a tin on a stick. Before the visitor was, well aware of what was being done the tin rattled, and new off the stick to the other side of the trench. "Pretty good, isn't showman would add', with conscious pride that his pet had come upVto'. promise. i - No Man's Land comes, perhaps, seci ond on the list of trench subjects-, but it has another name, in the district I write of. A visiting general'asked some question about the work of '-the patrols in No Man's Land and received .< an answer as satisfactory jisluinexpected. '"We do not call it No Man's -Land any longer," said the subaltern. "It % npw christened Canada." He spoke with justifiable pride. The. spaee>nas been annexed so completely that "no German has been known to venture upon it for a month or more.' ■''■ ..•'.'