Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin

the large protective iron plates through whose loopholes the German snipers used to shoot. Prichard took them home on leave in July to test against different rifles and ammunition. He found that big bullets (.577 or .470 Nitro Express) from a double-barrelled elephant gun, or even thesmaller but high-velocity Jeffreys .333, punched through the sheet-metal as if it were chocolate.
    Hesketh Prichard approached John Buchan in London about raising money to buy more such guns. The Spectator ran an appeal and Buchan got Lord Haldane and other wealthy men to assist. Meanwhile, Prichard visited Willie Clarkson (the famous London costumier who had dressed Virginia Woolf for the Abyssinian Dreadnought hoax), from whom he obtained a supply of the model heads used to display wigs. In September 1915, H. P. managed to escape from GHQ escort duties and began teaching ‘Sniping, Observation and Scouting’ to officers and men of Third Army. In the summer of 1916, he started an innovatory sniping school at Linghem in Belgium for First Army. By then, his mentor Charles Monro was back from Gallipoli and commanding First Army.
    Prichard had to overcome inertia above and ignorance below. He started out as a lone individual with no ‘Establishment’, authority or charge code. He had to step down in rank from major on the staff to infantry captain, and received no pay for eight months. Telescopic sights for rifles were in short supply, and 80 per cent of them were useless because improperly aligned and maintained, and no one knew anything about concealment or observation. But slowly, as he moved from brigade to brigade, Major Hesketh Prichard found allies and converts (‘Who is this blighter who’s coming?’… ‘Plays cricket, doesn’t he?’) as he demonstrated old ruses and new tricks to counter German sharpshooters, helping sniper/scouts to earn their fleur-de-lys badge.
    The theatrical heads from Clarkson’s the costumiers could be used as decoys to help locate hidden snipers. The head, set on a stick that slid up and down a grooved board, would be pushed cautiously above the parapet like someone taking a look; if hit by a sniper’s bullet, it was swiftly lowered. By inserting a rifle-cleaning rod through the bullet’s entry and exit holes in the dummy head you could get the exact angle and alignment of the shooter. Or you could slide a periscope up the groove in place of the head, spot the sniper, and then get counter-snipers to fix him in their sights.
    When Prichard visited the French Camouflage Works at Amiens in 1916 he fell on the camoufleur Henri Bouchard with joy. Here was a sculptor already making brilliantly realistic heads and shoulders of French and British soldiers out of papier mâché. They were morereadily available than Clarkson’s models from London, and so well done that they were impossible to tell from the real thing at 300 yards. H.P. got Bouchard modelling Gurkha and Sikh individual heads too, to vary the target and to worry German intelligence compiling an ‘order of battle’ or inventory of enemy troops. Some dummies even had a slot in the mouth for a lighted cigarette which could be puffed from below through a rubber tube. Prichard wrote: ‘It is a curious sensation to have the head through which you are smoking a cigarette suddenly shot with a Mauser bullet.’
    Camoufleurs helped snipers in the field by making realistic hides and observation posts which fitted seamlessly into no-man’s-land or the trenches: shattered brickwork, a French milestone, shorn-off poplars, a swollen dead horse, even the corpse of a Prussian or a French soldier. Camoufleurs also painted special full-length ‘sniper’s robes’ in the appropriate earth and vegetation colours.
    German soldiers grasped sooner than British ones that sticking out like a sore thumb was no good. Philip Gibbs describes a wooded section of the line between Vaux-sur-Somme and