"Yah!" he cried, and grinned as at some private joke.
The rifles spoke and he spun and fell. In his pocket was the officer's gold watch.
At the foot of a bullet-marked wall lay three worthless soldiers. Far away, a beaten army, lost for the nonce in the fog of war, rallied itself without molestation for another struggle.
A heavy north-east gale was setting with a flowing tide into the River Ems. Out at sea dark grey rainclouds blew raggedly over a background but little lighter in colour. The distant sea stretched away, cheerless and leaden, to a horizon that was whelmed in a grey mist where the elements met, indistinguishable. The nearer waters broke in a confused turmoil of white-caps on either hand. A heavy swell rolled dark between these shoals. Up the estuary a blur of dirty brown smoke, rising from behind a line of bleak sand-dunes, smudged the sagging sky. It rose from the little town of Emden, round the corner. A couple of tall posts, wireless "aerials," stood out black against the smoke.
In the river, just off the low sandy point, lay a long, four-funnelled cruiser. In the heavy rain-squalls which swallowed her every few minutes she looked like a thing of mist, so well did the grey of her hull and superstructure blend with the grey of sea and sky. She pitched slowly and gently at the taut-stretched cables of her bow anchors, her nose pointed seawards towards the incoming tide. From her steam-pipes the white vapour which issued, deafeningly stridulant, was torn violently away in horizontal pennons. At her peak a small flag blew out stiffly. At her stern, the ensign—black rectangular cross on white, centred with the crowned eagle and quartered with a small black cross upon the national colours, black, white and red—flattened itself out in the wind with loud claps as the gale half-released it for a second and then seized upon it again.
To and fro upon her navigating bridge the oilskin-clad officer of the watch paced restlessly. Under his sou'-wester, anxious, strained eyes peered from a haggard face whose weather-beaten brow was paled to an unhealthy yellow. Up and down he went, but never for a moment did he take those anxious eyes from the dark channel ahead of the ship's bows. The look-outs, posted at each end of the bridge close behind the canvas "dodger," gazed with equal fixity towards the sea. On their faces the same tension, the same evidence of sleepless nights, was visible. Behind them, in a wheelhouse from which the glass panels had been removed, stood a couple of quartermasters. Stiffly motionless behind the steering telemotor they conversed in low nervous voices. The hands of one of them, a giant of a man, shook continuously as he held them pendent against his thighs.
A blue-uniformed officer with gold bands across his cuffs appeared upon the bridge and approached the lieutenant. They saluted each other with a friendly nod after the formal fingers to the brow.