"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?"