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The sniper
Always nice to remember especially in this 100th Commemorative year of the War to End All Wars and a passage from World War Two
LEST WE FORGET
"To the sniper and scout comes all the fun of war. But it is like playing the fiddle or riding the bicycle - it looks easy enough until you learn properly how to do it. And many a fellow has found this to his cost - with a bullet through his neck - in trying the game before he has learned the rules.
And it is a game - the best game in the war, and only those are successful players in it who first study carefully the right way to play it, and who then play the game whole heartedly - for the side and not for themselves"
Robert Baden-Powell 7th July 1916
"The most dangerous individual soldier, and the worlds best rifle shot, is the sniper. I do not mean the soldier who is a good shot and who is occasionally detached as a "sniper", as is grudgingly done now in most armies. I mean the real sniper, the "lone wolf". He is deadly. He is feared more than the tank, more then the aeroplane.
The sniper holds his life by his initiative, his wits, even more than by his fearlessness. It is not only his rifle, it is his thought beforehand, added to cunning, which makes him so deadly, even against armies.
He can kill where an army cannot.And he can bring down the highest. Many a victorious Chief, many fighting Kings have fallen to the lone wolf. Many a famous General he has laid low. One of the best of our own Australian Generals fell to a sniper on Gallipoli. Several Italian and some among the best known of the German Generals have already fallen to the Russian snipers during this war"
Ion L. Idriess 1942
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The most dangerous & the most hated individual soldier on the battle field.
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........................and the most effective