hed, 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