Churchill's Wizards by Nicholas Rankin Page A

Curlu where a kind of warfare more like violent paintballing went on in the summer of 1915. Raiding parties of thirty to forty men stole into the thickets of no-man’s-land where they met
    a party of Germans … creeping forward from the other direction, in just the same way, disguised in parti-coloured clothes splashed with greens and reds and browns to make them invisible between the trees, with brown masks over their faces. Then suddenly contact was made.
    Into the silence of the wood came the sharp crack of rifles and the zip-zip of bullets, the shouts of men who had given up the game of invisibility.
    Realities of War (1920)
    Major Underhill of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry recreated no-man’s-land for Allied trainees to crawl around in at night, on a realistic site made by blowing craters in an old cornfield and littering the zone with wire and other authentic detritus. The (dummy) corpses had German Soldbücher or pass-books in their pockets and other useful identification on their sleeves. While defenders fired flares, attackers had to crawl as close as possible and hammer in a peg to prove in the morning where they had got to.
    Making use of cover, stalking, hiding, blending, waiting, concealment,careful aiming: it was precisely the world of rough shooting and big-game hunting, but with quarry that could fire back. Prichard’s book Sniping in France is like African or Indian shikar or hunting literature where, as in the classic stories by Jim Corbett, Colonel Patterson et al , the hunter has to offer himself rather than a tethered goat as the bait for a man-eater. Drawing the sniper’s shots by pretending to be an overeager duffer, blazing away carelessly from a loophole, while other judiciously sited spotters on your own side pin-point through telescopes the enemy’s flicker of muzzle flash or the wisp of smoke that lingered longer on chilly days, was all part of the deadly sport.
    Hesketh Prichard’s quest for what he called ‘the hunter spirit’ in the army was what first led him to the Lovat Scouts. They contributed the ‘ghillie suit’ to the art of camouflage from their deer-stalking origins. Modern British Army snipers still make ‘ghillie suits’ themselves for field use: a shrubby overcoat and trousers hung with long ragged strips of frayed nylon and dyed hessian, topped with dreadlocks of greenery, a camouflage suit that makes them look like vegetating yetis or sloths when they move, but turns them into bushy undergrowth wherever they settle to kill.
    Hunters understood camouflage because it was part of their regular practice. Two days after Solomon J. Solomon’s letter about camouflage appeared in January 1915, The Times printed a response from Walter Winans, a trotting-horse fanatic and Olympic pistol-shooting champion. Born in St Petersburg in 1852, where his father was US Consul, fabulously wealthy from Baltimore railway and engineering money, domiciled in England, but with a large boar-hunting estate in his ancestral Belgium, Walter Winans indulged his sporting passions to the limit.
    Uniforms and colour
    To the Editor of The Times
    Sir, – There is one point ‘S.J.S.’ has left out of his letter, with which I entirely agree otherwise. That is the importance of breaking up the outline. However well the tone of the clothing of a man is made to agree with its surroundings, the outline of the man is apt to show.
    Now, as an artist and big-game shot, I have found that if the waistcoat is one colour, the coat another, the leg coverings another, &c., its outline is less easy to make out. For instance, if lying down on a Scotch deer-forest waiting for deer – if the cap is the colour of a stone, the coat a peat hag, theknickerbockers grass colour, the stockings and boots black, to represent the exposed black peat, if the man keeps still he looks, not like one object, but an agglomeration of a small stone, peat hag, patch of