"No."
"Get a pair easy enough. You saw them boots without any hobnails in 'em, sticking out from under some blankets?"
"Yes. I get you." Kinnison knew that combat officers did not wear hobnails, and usually carried binoculars. "How come so many at once?"
"Just about all the officers that got this far. Conniving, my guess is, behind old Slayton's back. Anyway, a kraut aviator spots 'em and dives. Our machine-guns got him, but not until after he heaved a bomb. Dead center. Christ, what a mess! But there's six-seven good glasses in there. I'd grab one myself, but the general would see it—he can see right through the lid of a mess-kit. Well, the boys have shut those krauts up, so I'll hunt the old man up and tell him what I found out. Damn this mud!"
Kinnison emerged sinuously and snaked his way to a row of blanket covered forms. He lifted a blanket and gasped: then vomited up everything, it seemed, that he had eaten for days. But he had to have the binoculars.
He got them.
Then, still retching, white and shaken, he crept westward; availing himself of every possible item of cover.
For some time, from a point somewhere north of his route, a machine-gun had been intermittently at work. It was close; but the very loudness of its noise, confused as it was by resounding echoes, made it impossible to locate at all exactly the weapon's position. Kinnison crept forward inchwise; scanning every foot of visible terrain through his powerful glass. He knew by the sound that it was German. More, since what he did not know about machine-guns could have been printed in bill-poster type upon the back of his hand, he knew that it was a Maxim, Model 1907—a mean, mean gun. He deduced that it was doing plenty of damage to his fellows back on the hill, and that they had not been able to do much of anything about it. And it was beautifully hidden; even he, close as he must be, couldn't see it. But damn it, there had to be a....
Minute after minute, unmoving save for the traverse of his binoculars, he searched, and finally he found. A tiny plume—the veriest wisp—of vapor, rising from the surface of the brook. Steam! Steam from the cooling jacket of that Maxim 1907! And there was the tube!
Cautiously he moved around until he could trace that tube to its business end—the carefully-hidden emplacement. There it was! He couldn't maintain his westward course without them spotting him; nor could he go around far enough. And besides ... and besides that, there would be at least a patrol, if it hadn't gone up the hill already. And there were grenades available, right close....