I moved forward therefore over the intervening yards slowly and as quietly as might be. The voice broke off at times, then continued, and each time that it stopped I halted too, lest in the stillness I should be betrayed.
You remember the little pond at the side of the house, the pond that has at the bottom of it, to our knowledge, a dead Bavarian and an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander? At the edge of it I must have stopped a full five minutes, lying flat upon my stomach and listening to the intermittent sound of the voice. It was clearer now, low but distinct, and at last I knew for a certainty that the words came from a German throat. Occasionally a light laugh broke out which sounded uncannily in the still air. Laughter is not often heard from patrols between the lines, and I was puzzled and interested too.
A minute later I had clambered over the broken-down wall and was in what we used to think must have been the drawing-room of the house. Some time after this war is over I shall return and make straight for this house. I want to see what it looks like in daytime. I want to be able to stand in front of it and look out on the country beyond. I’ve crawled into it a dozen times at night, I’ve propped up its shelled, roofless walls with sand-bags, I’ve made a look-out loophole in the broken-down chimney. I’ve seen dim outlines from its glassless windows of hills and houses, but I am sure, quite sure, that when I see it and the country beyond it in the full glare of a summer sun I shall give a gasp of astonishment at what it is and what I thought it was.
Once inside the house I paused no longer, but, my revolver ready, my finger on the trigger, made straight for the spot from which came the voice.
My revolver was not needed, Dick. In the furthest corner of what we used to think must be the living-room, just near the spot where we found that photograph of the latest baby of the family in its proud mother’s arms and the gramophone record and the broken vase with the artificial flowers still in it—you remember what trophies they were to us—just there was the man. He was seated with his back propped up against the sand-bags where the two walls of the room make a corner, his legs angled out and his arms hanging limply down. It did not take a second glance to see that I had to do with a badly wounded German, but I took a look round first to make sure that there were no others either in the shell of the house or near it. When I had made certain, I returned to him and, putting my revolver within my reach on the floor beside me, knelt down and examined the man. He was plastered with mud, his cap was off his head, his breath was coming in little heavy jerks, and on the blue-grey uniform, just below the armpit on the right side, was a splash of blood mingling with the mud.
What I had done for your dead body I did for his barely living one, opened the tunic and by the aid of my electric torch—it was safe enough in the angle of the walls—examined the wound. It did not need a doctor to see that the man’s spirit was soon going to set out on the same voyage of adventure as yours, but I did what I could. I ripped my field dressing out of the lining of my coat and bound up the wound. Then I took out my flask and poured some brandy into his mouth. He had winced once or twice as I had dressed the wound but had not spoken; I think he was scarcely conscious.
But the spirit revived him and in a minute or so his eyes slowly opened and looked into mine. There was no such thing for him then as enemy or friend. He was simply a dying man and I was someone beside him helping him to die. His head turned over to one side and he murmured some German words. You used to laugh at me, Dick, for my hatred of the German language and my refusal to learn a word of it, but I wished heartily I knew some then. I answered him in English in the futile way one does. ‘That’s all right, old man,’ I said. ‘Feeling a bit easier now, eh?’
He looked at me fixedly for a moment or two and then suddenly summed up the International situation in a phrase.
‘This damned silly war!’ he said.
The remark, made with a strong German accent, was delivered with a little smile, and there was consciousness in his eyes. He finished it with a weary sigh and his hand moved slightly and rested on mine as I bent over him. There was a pool of water beside us in a hole in the hearth and I dipped my not too clean handkerchief in it and wiped some of the mud off his face. If I had felt any enmity against him for killing you, it was gone now. A war of attrition those beautiful war critics term it, and here was the attrition process in miniature. He had killed you and you had killed him, an officer apiece, and the Allies could stand the attrition longer than the Germans. I knew the argument and I have not the slightest doubt it is sound. In the meantime here was a man dying rather rapidly, very weary and only too ready for the last trench of all.