A REGRETTED SNIPER

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 137, 10 June 1916, Page 14

A REGRETTED SNIPER

A FIRST BEREAVEMENT.

During a recent tour of the French front, Professor J. 11. Morgan had a conversation with a French artilleryman in a little beershop within the war zone. In the course of it the artilleryman told a sniping story, which the professor retells in the April Nineteenth Century and After.

"I suppose you get used to the Boche— that is why you miss him," I said encouragingly, as he held up his glass with an "A tou6, M'sieu.'" "Parbleu! e'est Phabitude! I had a pal (un copain) who has never been the same man since he killed a certain Boche." "Indeed, you astonish me. You mean he regretted it? He had 'cold feet'?" "The feet cold ! What is it that it is that, M'sieu?" "I mean he had no stomach for fighting." "Ah, pardon. You mean what we call 'having the jingles.' But noj on the contrary. He had killed more Bodies than any man in the battalion. He was a perroquet." 'Perroquet' is trench ver nacular for a sniper. "Why then?" "The Boches had a 'perroquet' whosniped our men continually at about 300 metres You put your head over tho parapet, and pouf! it was time to send for the packetboat (trench slang for the ambulance), if you woro not dead already. We combed out every tree with the coffee-machino. and I blew up a likely looking stump with my little toad (trench-mortar), but wo never found him. So one morning th3 colonel of the battalion told my pal—his name was Jules—to go and find a place behind the tranchee de doublement — there were a lot of pollarded willows about—and to stay the-rc^ and watch for him. And every morning my pal legged up a tree and Jay there among the withies, and with his gun sighted for 400 metres he waited for rhe Jsoche. Ho picked off quite a lot of Boches in their trenches, but he never found the sniper. And there he was, studying the country every day as if it was one of those children's pictures which say 'Puzzle: Find the woodman.' When ho came back to tho trenches ho only talked of two things—his wife in Picardy and the Boche. One morning Jules arranged a little ruse. A gars was to put a. kepi on a. 'tooth-pick' and trot it up and down the trenches, just popping it up abovo the parapet and down again like a jack-in-the-box, and Jules was to watch from his nest in the willow tree. It worked Like a, charm. He put his h«a<l out. of a tree stump we'd never so much as looked at; it was so bare of leaves. He must have been a. small man, after ajl. 'Crack!' and he fell flop like a pheasant. When Jules came back we aJI slapped him on the back, and the captain gave him a franc to get half a pint of pinard. He was very pleased with himself at first, was Jules. But after a while he began to get very triste. He wouldn't take a hand at cards in the guitouno (dug-out), he did nothing but sit and smoke his pipe, and never spoke a word. Oh, he had the cockroach very badly. And none of us knew why.' And one day I found it out. He wanted Fritz. He was like a widower." "Widowers have sometimes found consolation in a new attachment," I remarked pensively. "Yes! That was what cured him. The Boches put up another sniper. After that he picked up a bit. Still, you know, M'sieu, one never really gets over a first bereavement, is it not so?"