Buckley wrote in a letter to his
Cousin, Willy Percy, on the 22/9/1919:
'The Divisional Observers was the
most interesting job I had; & we had the advantage of 2 very powerful telescopes, and
of a man (pte Fail) whose eye-sight was perfectly marvelous. He was also a fair sketcher,
& I had no difficulty in interpreting his drawings for the Heavy Artillery. One of the
great things I learned in France was that the artillery will fire on a sketch target where
they won't fire on a map reference. And when my fellows had seen the H.A. knocking down
the landscape in one of these sketches it made them red-hot keen. After that I sent in
dozens of these telescopic sketches to the H.A.
I can't tell you the value that I
think can be made out of sketching; - my observers / at least the best of them were
simply miners before the war and probably had little idea of drawing anything.
The division also got very keen on
getting a panoramic sketch made during the semi open warfare at the end of the campaign,
and you will see that one or two of these were reprinted and circulated down to officers
and sergeants before an attack'.
