And in and out, among the lorries and the guns, stream the French folk, women, children, old men, alert, industrious, full of hope, with friendly looks for their Allies.  Then the town passes, and we are out again in the open country, leaving the mining village behind.  We are not very far at this point from that portion of the line which I saw last year under General X’s guidance.  But everything looks very quiet and rural, and when we emerged on the high ground of the school we had come to see, I might have imagined myself on a Surrey or Hertfordshire common.  The officer in charge, a “mighty hunter” in civil life, showed us his work with a quiet but most contagious enthusiasm.  The problem that he, and his colleagues engaged in similar work in other sections of the front, had to solve, was—­how to beat the Germans at their own game of “sniping,” which cost us so many lives in the first year and a half of war; in other words, how to train a certain number of men to an art of rifle-shooting, combining the instincts and devices of a “Pathfinder” with the subtleties of modern optical and mechanical science.  “Don’t think of this as meant primarily to kill,” says the Chief of the School, as he walks beside me—­“it is meant primarily to protect.  We lost our best men—­young and promising officers in particular—­by the score before we learnt the tricks of the German ‘sniper’ and how to meet them.”  German “sniping,” as our guide explains, is by no means all tricks.  For the most part, it means just first-rate shooting, combined with the trained instinct and flair of the sportsman.  Is there anything that England—­and Scotland—­should provide more abundantly?  Still, there are tricks, and our men have learnt them.

Of the many surprises of the school I may not now speak.  Above all, it is a school of observation.  Nothing escapes the eye or the ear.  Every point, for instance, connected with our two unfamiliar figures will have been elaborately noted by those men on the edge of the hill; the officer in charge will presently get a careful report on us.

“We teach our men the old great game of war—­wit against wit—­courage against courage—­life against life.  We try many men here, and reject a good few.  But the men who have gone through our training here are valuable, both for attack and defence—­above all, let me repeat it, they are valuable for protection.”

And what is meant by this, I have since learnt in greater detail.  Before these schools were started, every day saw a heavy toll—­especially of officers’ lives—­taken by German snipers.  Compare with this one of the latest records:  that out of fifteen battalions there were only nine men killed by snipers in three months.

We leave the hill, half sliding down the frozen watercourse that leads to it, and are in the motor again, bound for an Army Headquarters.

No. 4