"Merci Monsieur, you will hear from this." And he left in a hurry. He phoned the gendarmes in the city of Ypres and in less than half-an-hour they came. They entered the farmhouse and searched it thoroughly. Upstairs they found parts of a heliograph lamp and a complete telephone apparatus; there was also in his stove a system that had been inaugurated for forcing up a shower of sparks; this apparatus had been found in the houses of a number of spies who had paid the penalty for their work. Then they made a search of the cellar in which were found hundreds of tins of beef and jam, all of which had come from our rations, and then was explained the mysterious disappearance of our grub. There was no trace to be found of our Algerian trooper; he had made a hasty exit.
Friend farmer and his wife were arrested, taken away with the children and placed in the coop, and there the traitorous couple got their deserts—they were taken to the square and shot.
After they had gone we made ourselves at home in the building, and the comforts that awaited us there made us feel almost glad that they had turned out to be spies. Among the rations we found that they had taken stuff that had been purloined from other units as far back as three months before. After a thorough ransacking and a feed that filled us to our heart's content, we made for the battery, being greeted with a fresh outburst on our arrival, and under the fire we pulled our remaining guns away to another hedge 200 yards off, and waited for the storm to settle.
While lying there the brains of one of our geniuses got to working and his ideas were quickly resolved into action. We went down to the barn, took a couple of wagons, taking off the wheels and the poles, and made up three dummy guns and placed them in the spot we had left, and in a few minutes' time we had the satisfaction of seeing Fritz spend three or four hundred good shells on our dummy battery.
A consuming thirst was parching my mouth and I took a chance and ran along the open to the house for a drink. Then it was that the disadvantageous side of our good work with the dummy guns was exemplified; just as I was stepping out of the door, a shell tore a hole in one corner of the building, knocking it out as clean as if it had been drilled.
The customary methods employed by the Germans to get information as to our guns, our troops, our supplies around Ypres, was to send a disguised soldier to the different farmhouses and threaten them with instant demolition by their guns if they did not furnish the information sought for, and thus did Fritz make good his promise to the farmer. By reason of our dummy guns and the strafing they got, and the fact that our guns still were firing, he believed that the farmer had given him a bunco steer, and he lost no time in making good his word.
Remaining in the hedge for a few hours, we dug holes for the guns, covered them with tarpaulins and grass on top, giving them the usual scenic shelter. We did this work in the open but only one man at a time exposed; it was as much as life was worth for more than one to be seen working. That evening, in the midst of our meal at cookhouse,—"Stand to!" and we raced for our pets. When the concert was well under way, Munsey noticed a light three or four hundred yards off that was acting somewhat peculiarly; it would flare up and down oddly and seemed to be in a farmhouse straight at our rear, but not much attention was paid to it at the time. Next morning Munsey and I were in the cookhouse, trying to moisten a couple of hardtack biscuits with what juice we could extract from a piece of bacon rind, when an airplane hummed overhead and the attention of one of our anti-aircraft guns was immediately diverted to the bird. The cookhouse had formerly been a French dressing station, dismantled by the fire of those devils that know no law of God or man, composed of three huts in a row made of half-inch board. While eating, one of our own shells, a shrapnel, that had been sent up at a German stork and did not explode, dropped squarely into the middle of the cookhouse, frightened the cook out of his wits and hit the dixies, scattering them around our feet. "Stand to!" and we made our way carefully, keeping out of sight as much as possible from the watching bird overhead.
When I got to the gun the shell fire was commencing to get dangerously close. "By God, there must be somebody giving our battery away," said Munsey. A number of our men had been wounded at this time and the airplane still buzzing above, made it impossible for us to fire, and we got a "Stand down!"
"Come on over," Munsey proposed, "and we'll see what's in that building where I saw the light." We found a family of civilians living there and they were at once very solicitous about giving us coffee. "Never mind the coffee," said Munsey; "we have come to examine the house." The old man seemed quite willing to have us do so and pointed the way upstairs, starting himself to go out the door. Munsey grabbed him by the arm,—"Come along and show us the way." He indicated that we could find the way ourselves, but my mate was insistent and he forced the old man along and upstairs we went.
At first nothing resulted from our thorough search, but Munsey's eye lighted on an Algerian serge lying in the corner of the room, and almost at the same time I noticed some bricks in the chimney that seemed to be loose. An old table in the middle of the room I pulled over to the chimney, tugged at some of the brick that I had noticed, and the whole thing caved in, part of a heliograph outfit falling out. The old fellow made a dart for the door, but was peremptorily intercepted. "Damn you, stay where you are!" I pulled out the rest of the stuff; there was a complete heliograph apparatus, and a little red cap, such as the Algerians wear, satisfying us both that the man doing the work used the uniform of an Algerian.