Part 14

"Do not move!" said Ainsley, wondering to himself if the man understood English, and fumbling in vain in his mind for the German phrase that would express his meaning.

"Kamarade--eh?" grunted the German, with a note of interrogation that left no doubt as to his meaning.

"Nein, nein!" answered Ainsley. "You kamarade--sie kamarade."

The other, in somewhat voluble gutturals, insisted that Ainsley must "kamarade," otherwise surrender. He spoke too fast for Ainsley's very limited knowledge of German to follow, but at least, to Ainsley's relief, there was for the moment no motion towards hostilities on either side. The Germans recognized, no doubt as he did, that the first sign of a shot, the first wink of a rifle flash out there in the open, would bring upon them a blaze of light and a storm of rifle and maxim bullets. Even although his party had slightly the advantage of position in the scanty cover of the ditch, he was not at all inclined to bring about another burst of firing, particularly as he was not sure that some excitable individuals in his own trench would not forget about his party being in the open and hail indiscriminate bullets in the direction of a rifle flash, or even the sound of indiscreetly loud talking.

Painfully, in very broken German, and a word or two at a time, he tried to make his enemy understand that it was his, the German party, that must surrender, pointing out as an argument that they were nearer to the British than to the German lines. The German, however, discounted this argument by stating that he had one more man in his party than Ainsley had, and must therefore claim the privilege of being captor.

The voice of his own sergeant close behind him spoke in a hoarse undertone: "Shall I blow a blinkin' 'ole in 'im, sir? I could do 'im in acrost your shoulder, as easy as kiss my 'and."

"No, no!" said Ainsley hurriedly; "a shot here would raise the mischief."

At the same time he heard some of the other Germans speak to the man in front of him and discovered that they were addressing him as "Sergeant."

"Sie ein sergeant?" he questioned, and on the German admitting that he was a sergeant, Ainsley, with more fumbling after German words and phrases, explained that he was an officer, and that therefore his, an officer's patrol, took precedence over that of a mere sergeant. He had a good deal of difficulty in making this clear to the German--either because the sergeant was particularly thick-witted or possibly because Ainsley's German was particularly bad. Ainsley inclined to put it down to the German's stupidity, and he began to grow exceedingly wroth over the business. Naturally it never occurred to him that he should surrender to the German, but it annoyed him exceedingly that the German should have any similar feelings about surrendering to him. Once more he bent his persuasive powers and indifferent German to the task of over-persuading the sergeant, and in return had to wait and slowly unravel some meaning from the odd words he could catch here and there in the sergeant's endeavor to over-persuade him.

He began to think at last that there was no way out of it but that suggested by his own sergeant--namely, to "blow a blinkin' 'ole in 'im," and his sergeant spoke again with the rattle of his chattering teeth playing a castanet accompaniment to his words.

"If you don't mind, sir, we'd all like to fight it out and make a run for it. We're all about froze stiff."

"I'm just about fed up with this fool, too," said Ainsley disgustedly. "Look here, all of you! Watch me when the next light goes up. If you see me grab my pistol, pick your man and shoot."

The voice of the German sergeant broke in:--

"Nein, nein!" and then in English: "You no shoot! You shoot, and uns shoot alzo!"

Ainsley listened to the stammering English in an amazement that gave way to overwhelming anger. "Here," he said angrily, "can you speak English?"

"Ein leetle, just ein leetle," replied the German.

But at that and at the memory of the long minutes spent there lying in the mud with chilled and frozen limbs trying to talk in German, at the time wasted, at his own stumbling German and the probable amusement his grammatical mistakes had given the others--the last, the Englishman's dislike to being laughed at, being perhaps the strongest factor--Ainsley's anger overcame him.

"You miserable blighter!" he said wrathfully. "You have the blazing cheek to keep me lying here in this filthy muck, mumbling and bungling over your beastly German, and then calmly tell me that you understand English all the time.

"Why couldn't you say you spoke English? What! D'you think I've nothing better to do than lie out here in a puddle of mud listening to you jabbering your beastly lingo? Silly ass! You saw that I didn't know German properly, to begin with--why couldn't you say you spoke English?"

But in his anger he had raised his voice a good deal above the safety limit, and the quick crackle of rifle fire and the soaring lights told that his voice had been heard, that the party or parties were discovered or suspected.

The rest followed so quickly, the action was so rapid and unpremeditated, that Ainsley never quite remembered its sequence. He has a confused memory of seeing the wet ground illumined by many lights, of drumming rifle fire and hissing bullets, and then, immediately after, the rush and crash of a couple of German "Fizz-Bang" shells. Probably it was the wet plop of some of the backward-flung bullets about him, possibly it was the movement of the German sergeant that wiped out the instinctive desire to flatten himself close to ground that drove him to instant action. The sergeant half lurched to his knees, thrusting forward the muzzle of his rifle. Ainsley clutched at the revolver in his holster, but before he could free it another shell crashed, the German jerked forward as if struck by a battering-ram between the shoulders, lay with white fingers clawing and clutching at the muddy grass. A momentary darkness fell, and Ainsley just had a glimpse of a knot of struggling figures, of the knot's falling apart with a clash of steel, of a rifle spouting a long tongue of flame ... and then a group of lights blazed again and disclosed the figures of his own three men crouching and glancing about them.

Of all these happenings Ainsley retains only a very jumbled recollection, but he remembers very distinctly his savage satisfaction at seeing "that fool sergeant" downed and the unappeased anger he still felt with him. He carried that anger back to his own trench; it still burned hot in him as they floundered and wallowed for interminable seconds over the greasy mud with the bullets slapping and smacking about them, as they wrenched and struggled over their own wire--where Ainsley, as it happened, had to wait to help his sergeant, who for all the advantage of their initiative in the attack and in the Germans being barely risen to meet it, had been caught by a bayonet-thrust in the thigh--the scramble across the parapet and hurried roll over into the waterlogged trench.

He arrived there wet to the skin and chilled to the bone, with his shoulder stinging abominably from the ragged tear of a ricochet bullet that had caught him in the last second on the parapet, and, above all, still filled with a consuming anger against the German sergeant. Five minutes later, in the Battalion H.Q. dugout, in making his report to the O.C. while the Medical dressed his arm, he only gave the barest and briefest account of his successful patrol and bombing work, but descanted at full length and with lurid wrath on the incident of the German patrol.

"When I think of that ignorant beast of a sergeant keeping me out there," he concluded disgustedly, "mumbling and spluttering over his confounded 'yaw, yaw' and 'nein, nein,' trying to scrape up odd German words--which I probably got all wrong--to make him understand, and him all the time quite well able to speak good enough English--that's what beats me--why couldn't he say he spoke English?"

"Well, anyhow," said the O.C. consolingly, "from what you tell me, he's dead now."

"I hope so," said Ainsley viciously, "and serve him jolly well right. But just think of the trouble it might have saved if he'd only said at first that he spoke English!" He sputtered wrathfully again: "Silly ass! Why couldn't he just say so?"

AS OTHERS SEE

"It may now be divulged that, some time ago, the British lines were extended for a considerable distance to the South."--EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL DISPATCH.