So the captain took a squint as informally requested. Sure enough, a hundred yards away, across the debatable territory, pocked with ragged shell pits and traversed by its two festering brown tangles of rusty barbed wire, he could see the flash of an uplifted shovel blade and see the brown clods flying over the lip of the enemy's parapet. He kept watching. Presently for just a tiny fraction of time the round cap of a German infantryman appeared above the earthen protection. The sergeant had guessed right, and the sergeant's gun spoke once. Once was enough—a greenhorn at this game would have known that much.
For there was a shriek over there, and a pair of empty outstretched hands were to be seen for one instant, with the fingers clutching at nothing; and then they disappeared, as their owner collapsed into the hole he had been digging.
Then, according to the captain, as the sergeant opened his rifle breach he turned toward the Cockney who crowded alongside him, and with a gratified grin on his face and a weight of sarcasm in his voice he said: “There goes another one, eh, bo, for King and Country?”
The Londoner answered on the instant, taking the same tone in the reply that the American had taken in the taunt. “My word,” he said, “but Gawge will be pleased w'en 'e 'ears wot you done fur 'im!”
Three of us made a long trip by automobile to pay a visit to a coloured regiment, both trip and visit being described elsewhere in these writings. The results more than repaid us for the time and trouble. One of the main compensations was First Class Private Cooksey, who, because he used to be an elevator attendant in a Harlem apartment house, gave his occupation in his enlistment blank as “indoor chauffeur.” It was to First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel of the regiment, seeing the expression on the other's face when a Minenwerfer from a German mortar fell near by on the day the command moved up to the Front, and made a hole in the earth deep enough and wide enough and long enough to hide the average smokehouse in—it was, I repeat, to First Class Private Cooksey that the colonel put this question:
“Cooksey, if one of those things drops right here alongside of us and goes off, are you going to stay by me?”
“Kurnal,” stated Private Cooksey with sincerity, “I ain't goin' tell you no lie. Ef one of them things busts clost to me I'll jest natch-elly be obliged to go away frum here. But please, suh, don't you set me down as no deserter. Jest put it in de books as 'absent without leave,' 'cause I'll be due back jest ez soon ez I kin git my brakes to work.”
“But what if the enemy suddenly appears in force without any preliminary bombardment?” pressed the colonel. “What do you think you and the rest of the boys will do then?”
“Kurnal,” said Cooksey earnestly, “we may not stick by you but we'll shore render one service anyway: We'll spread de word all over France 'at de Germans is comin'!”
Nevertheless, when the Germans did advance it is of record that neither First Class Private Cooksey nor any of his black and brown mates showed the white feather or the yellow streak or the turned back. Those to whom the test came stayed and fought, and it was the Germans who went away.