“I sure do admire that boy’s aim. Let’s go, Hicks.”
Abruptly the ravine shallowed out and they found themselves running for the village, their bodies wholly exposed. As they approached, a door in one of the buildings of the badly battered town was thrown open and a voice called: “Here you are, fellows. Come in this way.”
“Hell, if you think you had it hard, you ought to have been with us.”
Hicks and Cole, resting after they had filled the canteens with water from a creaky pump in the village square, were seated in a room of the building through which they had entered the town. At the window near the door a thin-snouted Hotchkiss machine-gun was pointed out over the field. Beside it, his head lying against the saddle, a man was reclining. It was he who had spoken.
“Think of carrying one of these guns over your shoulder and walking through heavy rifle fire the whole length of that field! Pretty tough. Pretty tough.”
“Oh, forget about it; it’d a been worse if you’d a been killed.”
“I don’t know so much about that!”
“And when we got in this town. Boy, we sure did clump them Dutchmen over the head! Firin’ out of the windows, they were, and us comin’ in in plain sight. But we knocked ’em for a gool, a cock-eyed gool. I thought them God-damned Squareheads could fight.” He chuckled and stretched his body. “But you oughta seen ’em run when we swarmed in here.”
“I guess they fought well enough to knock off most of us.”