CHAPTER ELEVEN
After spending a few more days in this last, very warm position, we moved to billets a little way off behind our left flank, and we certainly needed the rest. There was no indication that these billets had been used before by our troops. Jock Hunter and I were assigned to a barn, and you may be sure I was delighted at the prospect of literally “hitting the hay” as the Americans say.
As there were chickens running around, even over every part of the thatched house, Jock and I went in search of eggs, for oh! how we longed for a change of diet! For weeks it had been bully beef and biscuits, and then biscuits and bully beef. In our search, we climbed up the ladder to the attic, which we found to be very spacious, with heaps of straw on the floor here and there. The walls of the structure, I should judge, were about four feet thick, and there was a space that wide where the parapet of the wall and thatching came near together.
On reaching the attic we could hear the voices of our fellows in the farm yard below. The noise came through the opening between the parapet and thatching which was supported by beams. The aperture must have been about a foot in height. Approaching this—with the intention of playing a trick on the boys by throwing a piece of stone from the top of the wall—I noticed, dangling over the edge, a black leather strap. Carelessly I gave it a sharp tug, when out came a “Colt,” the handle of which I instantly caught. I scarcely had it in my hands when a man’s head popped up and I found myself facing a German soldier. He started to reach to his side but I had him covered. I do not know whether he or I was the more greatly surprised.
“Hands up, ye swine!” I shouted, holding him cowed with his own revolver, although I was entirely ignorant of its mechanism, and did not even know how to release the safety catch.
He slid out of the recess under the thatch which he had been occupying and stood on the floor. With his hands up, he kept muttering:
“Mercy! Kamerad! Kamerad!”
Jock seemed stunned at this sudden and unthought of “find.”
I asked him to tie the boche’s hands, which he did with his rifle pull-through, and we marched him down to the officers’ quarters. The officers were just preparing to eat, and were astounded at the sudden appearance of the boche in the doorway, as we made him walk in first. We left the prisoner and his Colt with the officers. Then we returned to search the loft.