After spending a few more days in this last, very warm position, we moved
to billets a little way off behind our left flank, and we certainly needed
the rest. There was no indication that these billets had been used before
by our troops. Jock Hunter and I were assigned to a barn, and you may be
sure I was delighted at the prospect of literally "hitting the hay" as the
Americans say.
As there were chickens running around, even over every part of the
thatched house, Jock and I went in search of eggs, for oh! how we longed
for a change of diet! For weeks it had been bully beef and biscuits, and
then biscuits and bully beef. In our search, we climbed up the ladder to
the attic, which we found to be very spacious, with heaps of straw on the
floor here and there. The walls of the structure, I should judge, were
about four feet thick, and there was a space that wide where the parapet
of the wall and thatching came near together.
On reaching the attic we could hear the voices of our fellows in the farm
yard below. The noise came through the opening between the parapet and
thatching which was supported by beams. The aperture must have been about
a foot in height. Approaching this--with the intention of playing a trick
on the boys by throwing a piece of stone from the top of the wall--I
noticed, dangling over the edge, a black leather strap. Carelessly I gave
it a sharp tug, when out came a "Colt," the handle of which I instantly
caught. I scarcely had it in my hands when a man's head popped up and I
found myself facing a German soldier. He started to reach to his side but
I had him covered. I do not know whether he or I was the more greatly
surprised.
"Hands up, ye swine!" I shouted, holding him cowed with his own revolver,
although I was entirely ignorant of its mechanism, and did not even know
how to release the safety catch.
He slid out of the recess under the thatch which he had been occupying
and stood on the floor. With his hands up, he kept muttering:
"Mercy! _Kamerad! Kamerad!_"