"Have no fear; I shall not report you," said his companion, with a friendly squeeze of the arm. "He is not only a great brute, but he is an arrant coward into the bargain. The men do not mind being cuffed and bullied, because they are used to it; but when they see their officer never expose himself, and always shouting from the rear 'Get on, you pigs!' they don't like it. But, Himmel!"—and he chuckled—"our engineers have surpassed themselves to-night. I have never seen wire so strong during the war. Our whole front is covered with it; not so much as a rat could get through."
"That is good," assented his listener, mentally feeling how bad it was for himself, and that, short of a miracle, he must stay where he was until daylight.
"I have just been making a report to Colonel Schlutz," went on the sergeant. "Now you and I will go to a snug little dug-out I have taken possession of. I have a nice piece of sausage which we will share, and what do you think?—four bottles of lager beer! What do you think of that?"
"I say that you are a good comrade, sergeant—the best I have met for many a long day," said Dennis, with a warmth he really felt. This man was evidently a good fellow at heart, an exception to the general run of German non-commissioned officers. And yet it might come about that he would have to kill him, in spite of that nice piece of sausage and those four bottles!
The sergeant had called it a snug little dug-out, that square hole in the chalk, with earth piled on a piece of corrugated iron by way of roof, and great rats peering at them as they sat with their knees touching by the light of a piece of candle.
But to Dennis it was a palace, hiding him, as it did, from inquisitive eyes.
"Surely it is written that I shall win through," he thought to himself. "Everything seems to point to it."
A shell burst close to them and rattled the corrugated iron, bringing a shower of earth down in front of the dug-out door.
"I will go and see if that has done any damage," said the sergeant. "You may stay here until the alarm is given. Your post will be in that bay in front of us. Why don't you go to sleep? I should if I were not an Unteroffizier."
He came back again in a few minutes, to find that Dennis had taken him at his word, and was watching the rats fearlessly searching for crumbs between his very feet.