From: "Charlie", [EMAIL PROTECTED] I have not heard of the Sportsmen's Battalion. The British Sniping School in France was set up by my great-grandfather Hesketh Prichard, the "landed gent" Nick talks about. Here is part of an article I wrote about him in Shooting Times in 1995: At the outbreak of the war, HP was refused a commission because of his age, 37, but he found ways round that. He even managed to find fellow big-game Shot F C Selous a job. Selous was later killed in action in East Africa after winning the DSO. HP began his war career showing journalists around the trenches. But he did not feel he was being much use, and started musing about the possibility of using his big game experience in the field of sniping. He crawled to the German trenches one night and appropriated one of their steel plates to see how thick they were. Testing them alongside English plates, he found that the German Mauser rifle could easily penetrate the English plates, whereas the German plates needed a Jeffery .33, .450, or heavier elephant rifle. So he set to work gathering guns and telescopic sights from his big game hunting friends in Britain and America, including Theodore Roosevelt. The result was his establishment of the British Sniping School in France, and some of the first serious work with camouflage. As a sniper he had several long-running duels with German snipers. General staff realised his value. "You are the only instructor in this branch of the game," one wrote to him. "Any undue risk or exposure taken by you is not in the interests of the British army. Others may do it and be justified - you must not, and so keep the brake on." He survived the war, and wrote a book [reprinted in 1994, republished by Leo Cooper] called Sniping in France, and another - to my mind his best book - called Sport in Wildest Britain. One of his stories was turned into a successful West End play. Outwardy he remained cheerful, but he suffered from the malaise that so many people reported in those post war days - a misty faraway look in the eyes of one who saw too much death in the fields of France. Some believed it was the sniper's personal horror of looking through a telescope at his target, and living a man's last few seconds of life almost on his lap before squeezing the trigger. HP also contracted a rare form of blood poisoning that doctors could not treat. He had four years of sickness, 14 operations, and finally died on June 14 1922. Regards Charlie Jacoby Cybershooters website: http://www.cybershooters.org List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___________________________________________________________ T O P I C A The Email You Want. http://www.topica.com/t/16 Newsletters, Tips and Discussions on Your Favorite Topics
