We went up to him and said, ‘Who are you? Are you English, or are you the enemy?’
‘We’re the enemy,’ he said, and he did not seem ashamed of being what he was. And he spoke English with quite a good accent for a foreigner.
‘The enemy!’ Oswald echoed in shocked tones. It is a terrible thing to a loyal and patriotic youth to see an enemy cleaning a pot in an English field, with English sand, and looking as much at home as if he was in his foreign fastnesses.
The enemy seemed to read Oswald’s thoughts with deadly unerringness. He said—
‘The English are somewhere over on the other side of the hill. They are trying to keep us out of Maidstone.’
After this our plan of mingling with the troops did not seem worth going on with. This soldier, in spite of his unerringness in reading Oswald’s innermost heart, seemed not so very sharp in other things, or he would never have given away his secret plans like this, for he must have known from our accents that we were Britons to the backbone. Or perhaps (Oswald thought this, and it made his blood at once boil and freeze, which our uncle had told us was possible, but only in India), perhaps he thought that Maidstone was already as good as taken and it didn’t matter what he said. While Oswald was debating within his intellect what to say next, and how to say it so as to discover as many as possible of the enemy’s dark secrets, Noel said—
‘How did you get here? You weren’t here yesterday at tea-time.’
The soldier gave the pot another sandy rub, and said—
‘I daresay it does seem quick work—the camp seems as if it had sprung up in the night, doesn’t it?—like a mushroom.’
Alice and Oswald looked at each other, and then at the rest of us. The words ‘sprung up in the night’ seemed to touch a string in every heart.