It was night when, rifle in hand, he swung himself nimbly over the parapet. For some minutes he lay flat on the ground at the other side, not moving an inch. Over his head the crack of rifles and the loud, rapid hammer taps of the Maxims recommenced their fusillade against the heap of bricks. From the first shade of dusk he had arranged that a constant enfilading fire be kept up on the sniper's lurking-place. He had no intention of letting Hermann slip away—yet.
He raised his head slightly, fixed his bearings in the gloom and then, still prone, began to nip a way through the wire entanglements. A German flare went up, dazzling with a ghastly light, too brilliant for distinct vision. He lay motionless. As it descended and fizzled out upon the ground he had a clear view of his course. He was aiming at a point in front of the German wire, whence he could enfilade the gap between the heap of bricks and the hostile parapet. Over his head the hard, sharp cracks of his own men's fire followed one another continuously. They would not cease for nearly fifteen minutes yet. Meanwhile Hermann would be lying close. He cut and wrenched at the wire and wriggled forward, grimly disdainful of the barbs that plucked and tore his clothes.
Again and again a soaring German flare stopped his progress. Clearly, this incessant fusillade was making the enemy nervous. At each illumination he lay as if he were one of the bundles of old clothes that occasionally he pushed against. The British parapet darted with fire—awoke a sympathetic crackling somewhere to the right.
At last. He settled himself in a comfortable firing position, couched in the long damp grass. An insect, unaware in its littleness of the large death that whistled above its world, quitted a pendent blade, explored his cheek.
Crack—crack—crack! the last British rifles ceased. There was an instant's stillness, and then yet another flare shot up from the suspicious German trench. It fell, sizzled—illuminating the ruins that he watched with all his faculties focussed, all his nerves coming to a point on his trigger finger—and then the world plunged into blackness. There was silence and impenetrable darkness.
Minute after minute dragged slowly past in a dead hush. Finger on trigger, every fibre tense, the prone figure waited. A primeval self awoke in him—a savage who stalked and could indefinitely maintain his ambush. His senses were as keen as though hyper-stimulated by some strange drug. A grim, patient lust to kill reigned in him.
The minutes passed slowly, slowly. He looked to one of them, not yet arrived, as to a term. When? He felt it approaching, concentrated to a still acuter degree his attention. The trigger seemed to be pressing against his finger. What was that? Surely something was moving there in the gloom—by the ruin. Why did not the flare he had ordered go up? His whole soul went out in a desperate prayer for it as he held his breath and strove with baffled eyes against the darkness.
Suddenly the craved-for light shot up. Perception and trigger-pressure were instantaneous with the flash of its discharge. A running, stooping figure pitched headforemost before the stab of flame from the rifle.
Immediately a vicious fire from the German parapet answered this impertinence. The slayer lay still as death, listening with painfully acute perception to the ugly phat! of bullets in the earth around him. A bomb fell, burst with a deafening report and a blinding flash of flame so close that he marvelled at his escape. By an effort of will he choked down the cough that the fumes provoked.
Rifle-fire at night is infectious. A sporadic and probably harmless duel sputtered up and down the trenches. At last a gun, way back somewhere, sent over a shell, and, as though obedient to this protest from their big brother, the rifles were silenced, one by one. The opposing trenches again lay in darkness and quiet.