the beginning of '15. He had taken up sniping and made himself a dead shot. He had the hunter's instinct and would wait hours behind the sandbags for the sight of a German head in the trenches opposite. He seldom missed his man, or that part of his body which showed for a second. Lately he had taken to the habit of crawling out into No Man's Land and waiting in some shell-hole for the dawn, when Germans came out to mend their wire or drag in a dead body. He generally left another dead man as a bait for the living. Then he would come back with a grim smile and eat his breakfast wolfishly, after cutting a notch in one of the beams of his dug-out.
"He's a Hun-hater, body and soul," said the Colonel. "We want more of 'em. All the same, Brand makes me feel queer by his ferocity. I like a humourous fellow who does his killing cheerfully."
After that I met Brand and took a drink with him in his dug-out. He answered my remarks gruffly for a time.
"I hear you go in for sniping a good deal," I said, by way of conversation.
"Yes. It's murder made easy."
"Do you get many targets?"
"It's a waiting game. Sometimes they get careless."
He puffed at a black old pipe, quite silent for a time. Presently he told me about a "young'un" who popped his head over the parapet, twice, to stare at something on the edge of the mine-crater.
"I spared him twice. The third time I said, 'Better dead,' and let go at him. The kid was too easy to miss."
Something in the tone of his voice told me that he hated himself for that.
"Rather a pity," I mumbled.
"War," he said. "Bloody war."
There was a candle burning on the wooden bench on
