“Ashes! He has had a fire here, monsieur, but it was days ago.” At the man’s feet the Baas had discovered the remnants of a little fire. “Holy blue!” he added in astonishment, “he has eaten these!”
A pile of small green twigs lay near the fire. The bark had been chewed from them!
At the end of our search we turned again to the man on the ground. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” I demanded again. There was no answer. “Baas, have you a flask?”
The old man slowly drew a little leather-clad bottle from his breast pocket and passed it to me in silence. He offered it with obvious reluctance, and watched jealously as I knelt and dropped a little stream of liquid between the parted lips of the creature on the ground. The man’s lips sucked inward, his throat choked at the raw liquor, he opened his mouth wide and gasped horribly for breath, his knees twitched, and his wrists trembled as if he were dying. Then the parched mouth tried to form words; it could only grimace.
For a moment I felt a mad impulse to leap on that moving mouth and crush it into stillness; such an impulse as makes a hunter wring the neck of a wounded bird. Instead, I continued dropping the stinging liquor and listening.
Then came the first word. “More!” the black lips begged, and I emptied the flask into them. The Baas sighed plaintively. “German?” the soldier whispered.
“No. American,” I answered.
“The other one?”
“Belgian.”