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Page 37
At last the party came to the German wires. The lieutenant had
drawn on a rubber glove. In his gloved hand he grasped a strip of
steel which he held in front of him, like a wand, fanning the air
with it.
As he came to the entanglement, he probed the barbed wire
carefully with his wand, watching for an ensuing spark. For the
Germans more than once had been known to electrify their wires,
with fatal results to luckless prowlers.
These wires, to-night, were not charged. And, with pliers, the
lieutenant and Mahan started to cut a passageway through them.
As the very first strand parted under his pressure, Mahan laid
one hand warningly on the lieutenant's sleeve, and then passed
the same prearranged warning down the line to the left.
Silence--moveless, tense, sharply listening silence--followed his
motion. Then the rest of the party heard the sound which Mahan's
keener ears had caught a moment earlier--the thud of many
marching feet. Here was no furtive creeping, as when the twelve
Yankees had moved along. Rather was it the rhythmic beat of at
least a hundred pairs of shapeless army boots--perhaps of more.
The unseen marchers were moving wordlessly, but with no effort at
muffling the even tread of their multiple feet.
"They're coming this way!" breathed Sergeant Mahan almost without
sound, his lips close to the excited young lieutenant's ear. "And
they're not fifty paces off. That means they're boches. So near
the German wire, our men would either be crawling or else
charging, not marching! It's a company--maybe a battalion--coming
back from a reconnaissance, and making for a gap in their own
wire some where near here. If we lay low there's an off chance
they may pass us by."
Without awaiting the lieutenant's order, Mahan passed along the
signal for every man to drop to earth and lie there. He all but
forced the eagerly gesticulating lieutenant to the ground.
On came the swinging tread of the Germans. Mahan, listening
breathlessly, tried to gauge the distance and the direction. He
figured, presently, that the break the Germans had made in their
wire could be only a few yards below the spot where he and the
lieutenant had been at work with the pliers. Thus the intruders,
from their present course, must inevitably pass very close to the
prostrate Americans--so close, perhaps, as to brush against the
nearest of them, or even to step on one or more of the crouching
figures.
Mahan whispered to the man on his immediate left, the rookie from
Missouri:
"Edge closer to the wire--close as you can wiggle, and lie flat.
Pass on the word."
The Missourian obeyed. Before writhing his long body forward
against the bristly mass of wire he passed the instructions on to
the man at his own left.
But his nerves were at breaking-point.
It had been bad enough to crawl through the blind fog, with the
ghostly steps of his comrades pattering softly at either side of
him. But it was a thousand times harder to lie helpless here, in
the choking fog and on the soaked ground, while countless enemies
were bearing down, unseen, upon him, on one side, and an
impenetrable wire cut off his retreat on the other.
The Missourian had let his imagination begin to work; always a
mistake in a private soldier. He was visualizing the moment when
this tramping German force should become aware of the presence of
their puny foes and should slaughter them against the merciless
wires. It would not be a fair stand-up fight, this murder-rush of
hundreds of men against twelve who were penned in and could not
maneuver nor escape. And the thought of it was doing queer things
to the rookie's overwrought nerves.
Having passed the word to creep closer to the wires, he began to
execute the order in person, with no delay at all. But he was a
fraction of a second too late. The Germans were moving in hike-
formation with "points" thrown out in advance to either side--a
"point" being a private soldier who, for scouting and other
purposes, marches at some distance from the main body.
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