The subaltern, assuring himself that all was still, wriggled forward to the body of his victim, lay full-length beside it. Quickly he ran through the dead man's pockets, stuffed a bundle of papers into his own. Then, a rifle in each hand, he crawled back to his own parapet, climbed over and lay down. In an instant he was sound asleep.
It was bright morning when he awoke. High up a lark was pouring out its cheerful song. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, saw the two rifles, and remembered with a smile. Close by him a man was heating some coffee in a mess-tin over a methylated flame. He asked for some and drank it with a pleasant physical sense of his body that was still alive, and could drink. It warmed him. Then he remembered the papers he had taken from the unlucky Hermann. Sipping at the coffee, he read a letter that was among them.
"Dearest Wife and Sweetheart," it ran, "I don't altogether like the hatred of these Englishmen that your letter expresses. They only do their duty as we do ours, and they fight well. Would all this killing were over and we were friends again! It is in a sacred cause, I know—we could not let our culture be stifled—but the sacrifices are heavy. I sometimes wonder whether the old days will ever return, and I shall once more write songs for you to sing in London and in Paris. I can faintly hear a nightingale somewhere, or is it you?—I must close now, as I am just ordered off to a dangerous post, and the dawn will soon be breaking.
"All the love of
Karl."
Lennard, moved by a sudden curiosity, looked at the superscription of the envelope, ready addressed. Evidently the sniper had put it in his pocket and forgotten to give it to his comrades before setting out. The name was familiar. He coupled it, Karl ——. His victim was a writer of songs that his wife loved to sing and he to hear. He sat for a moment gazing thoughtfully at the letter, yet without definite thoughts. Then, with a sigh, he rose.
Instantly a bullet smacked against the sandbags, missing his head by a couple of inches.
"Bad shot, that," he murmured as he ducked. "Lucky thing I bagged old Hermann!"
The intense heat of the day was already a memory of uneasy sleep, and the distant hills seen across the plain of grey, sun-baked mud were soft in a soft sky. Right across the horizon, as seen from the Political Officer's bungalow, stretched the mountain range, rising from deep blue at the base through a gradation of fairy amethyst and turquoise to a delicate pink suffusing the summits. The Political Officer, his left elbow resting on his writing-table, his fingers caressing the bowl of the old briar whose stem was gripped between white teeth, tobacco-smoke wreathing away from him, contemplated it with bent brows and narrowed eyes. The gaze of that lean face, sallow with many Indian summers, roved not over the distant prospect, tempting though were the transitions and flaws of changing colour on crag and peak to left and right of the point on which his vision was fixed. His expression was stern, the thrust forward of his clean-cut jaw predominant. Æsthetic enjoyment of the aspect of the frontier hills thus perfidiously beautiful in the evening light had no part in his meditations.