It seemed ridiculous to think of “MacPherson”—with his tiny body and his face of a black angel “getting” anybody.
The little Algerian disappeared. At the end of three hours, after we had all given him up as lost or strayed, he returned, clutching a small untidy package rolled in a French newspaper.
“Well, then, he didn’t eat you up, did he?” some one asked.
The little Algerian understood English poorly, but he generally got the gist of things. This time he evidently thought he had been asked whether he had eaten up the sniper.
“Ugh!” he exclaimed; “me no eat sniper, but git him. Look here.”
Very gingerly he unrolled his sheet of newspaper and, as evidence that he had landed his man, exposed to view a human ear. He wanted to present the ear to the lieutenant, but the officer declined the honour.[1]
There was much night-patrol work to do on the Aisne. Often we ran into German reconnaissance patrols. One night I was scouting with another man. Five or six hundred yards from our lines, we came upon a boche sentry. He was a big, heavy fellow, and I remember thinking that he looked as if the hard army life had not yet worked the surfeit of beer out of his system. He was leaning on the parapet, and appeared to be asleep. We wanted to get beyond, as he was on the German advance listening post, but, as a reconnaissance patrol must conceal from the enemy all evidence of its proximity, we dared not shoot him. So we crawled to one side of him, and my partner, who was slightly ahead, gave him a thud on the side of the neck, which only, as we thought, made him sleep the more soundly. He dropped into the trench. The next moment a head bobbed up and the dose was repeated with the result that the boche (whom we had mistaken for the first man) slid back again. We looked over to see whether the second blow had done its work; there were two forms instead of one. My partner took a helmet as a souvenir. He kept it for one day and then abandoned it as inconvenient to carry. He found that a souvenir the size of a boche’s helmet could not be put between the leaves of his St. John’s Gospel.
Being about the only Black Watch scout left of those that had first landed in France, I had been almost constantly on duty during the fighting at the Aisne. You can imagine then how happy I was when we were relieved from the trenches and billeted a short distance in the rear in hay lofts, cottages, and stables.
On our way to billets we were looking forward to a “cushy” time, a good rest, a decent meal, and a wash, and hoping that the next section of trench we took over would be much quieter. It did not seem, however, as if I had had much more than the proverbial “forty winks” when we were sent back to support the Cameron Highlanders.