My breath was coming in gasps. I thought it was all up, for the whole camp—a bivouac of a company it surely was—went into an uproar of shouts and shots and flashes.
"Amerikaner!" I heard several times.
I don't know how far I ran. Not far. For I was expecting to be hit at any moment. Again I found a low-growing bush. And again half-anticipating finding myself with the enemy, I sprawled in under it. My breath was burning my throat. I was horribly thirsty. And my heart was pounding like a pile driver—and every bit as loud.
Little by little I squirmed in under the branches. Voices came from half a dozen directions. Some were drawing toward me. About fifteen yards to my right front, shots came steadily from what I knew to be another funk hole. I thought of the shiny hobnails on the runners' boots, and drew my legs up closer. My watch gleamed like a group of flares, and I twisted its face to the under side of my wrist.
The voices were very close now. It seemed to be a little party, beating the bushes for me. I saw one fellow's head and shoulders against the sky line. My first thought was of my gun. I knew there was but a single cartridge left. Softly I opened the clips on my cartridge pouch and reloaded.
I didn't like lying face down. It was too inviting to a shot in the back. I wanted to roll over and be prepared when they came upon me, to sit up into some sort of firing position. But my white face (and I'll wager it was unwontedly white!) might show up in the dark. So I clawed my fingers into the ground in the hope that I could apply some camouflage in the form of mud. But mud is perverse; it lies yards deep when you don't want it, and is miles away when you do. The ground was wet enough from the rains—so was I, for that matter!—but with spongy, dead leaves. I tried smearing some over the backs of my hands, but when I extended one to get the effect it was as lily-white as milady's; whereat I hastily tucked it back under my gas mask, worn at the "alert" upon my chest.
The searchers, meantime, were snaking around among the bushes. Their conversation was as audible as it was meaningless to me—now to my left, next close up, then withdrawing to my right.
All this time the "li'l .45" was ready if they got so near that discovery would be inevitable. I hadn't given up hope by any means, but I did let myself picture several boches taking my maps and message books (one of them full of carbon copies) into some dugout. Such odd little thoughts as how long it would take them to find a boche who could read English occurred to me. And from that I was whisked back to a Forty-second Street barber whose English was excellent and who had told me of his service in the German army. Many such reservists must have returned to the Fatherland. I wondered, too, if, in the anticipated exchange of shots, having wounded me, they would kill me outright in reprisal for my killing their two comrades.
Oh, it was a cheerful line of speculation! I was deep in it when, above the regular shots of the fellow in the funk hole nearest me, came a rattle of pistol explosions some distance away. "One of the runners," I thought. "Hope he was as lucky as I." Munson told me later that he had run into a boche near a railway track and had dropped him.
The chap in the near-by funk hole began to amuse me now. He kept up his shots at fifteen-second intervals for half an hour. I'm inclined to believe those Jerries were more frightened than we. May have thought it was a surprise attack in force. This fellow, for instance, was firing, I knew, at nothing in the world but atmosphere. And in his own mind he may have been bumping off a lot of Yanks lying in wait for the word to charge at his front—wherever in blazes his front was!