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Hedgerows
waterproof bag and overpowered the pistol. I have never seen so much rust in all my life.
I had to detail strip the gun, which means taking it apart into very tiny pieces indeed; scrub and
oil each piece; and then try to remember how to get it back together again. Every time I just
about had one piece maneuvered into position, the telephone (invention of the devil!) would ring
and someone would want to talk to me. Periodically I would drop some small but essential jigger
into the grass and have to comb for it. Finally I gave up and got a spare sergeant to finish the job
for me. I don't really recall accomplishing anything at all that day except getting that accursed
pistol cleaned. Had I known then that the war would end before I fired it again, I probably would
have let it rust. But there were times when I would have been lonesome without it.
Ray Wright, who had the same job to do, was sitting in a command car doing it, when
Jake commented that there had been a lot of trouble with snipers. Ray noted for the first time
how extremely high a silhouette a command car has, so he finished up the job kneeling on the
floorboards.
We fought from daylight to dark in those early days, and that meant from about 4 a.m.
until about 11:30 p.m. (Double British Summer Time). Hours of darkness were usually taken up
getting ready for the next day's fighting. Later on we found we did better by taking it easier, but
in those days it was right in the tradition of maneuvers, when we had never gotten any sleep, and
we took it for granted. Our nerves were worn pretty thin by the end of the first week, however.
We made our second move during daylight, and while we were moving in, we got
another big scare: snipers. One man was wounded while standing right next to the switchboard,
and another bullet clipped a twig off a tree just a couple of feet from Col. Costain's head.
Col Costain was a brave man, and he had played down the sniper angle on the grounds
that when you started shooting back at them you usually ended up in a firefight with some
nearby friendly unit that thought you were a sniper yourself. He was right, of course. But this
time he called me over. "Bob," he said, "there is a German sniper in the next field over that way
or the one just beyond. He almost shot me, and he might shoot someone else any minute. Take a
couple of men and get him. He's probably in one of the trees; the bullet seemed to come from
above."
I felt the knot in my belly tighten another notch. I hadn't the foggiest idea how to go
about finding a sniper, let alone "get" him, but I told myself that this mission was nothing
compared to what infantry did all day. Finally I took two men with carbines and put them at the
corners of the next field and told them to "cover" me. I thought that meant to watch for a flash if
the sniper fired at me and to shoot at it: I hope that was what they thought too. Then I walked
with a nervous crouch all around the field, pistol in hand, peering up into each tree and kicking
into every ditch. I did not find a sniper, so we repeated the process for two or three more fields
with no effect except to raise my blood pressure.
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