time wasted, at his own stumbling German and the probable amusement his
grammatical mistakes had given the others--the last, the Englishman's
dislike to being laughed at, being perhaps the strongest
factor--Ainsley's anger overcame him.

"You miserable blighter!" he said wrathfully. "You have the blazing
cheek to keep me lying here in this filthy muck, mumbling and bungling
over your beastly German, and then calmly tell me that you understand
English all the time.

"Why couldn't you _say_ you spoke English? What! D'you think I've
nothing better to do than lie out here in a puddle of mud listening to
you jabbering your beastly lingo? Silly ass! You saw that I didn't know
German properly, to begin with--why couldn't you say you spoke
English?"

But in his anger he had raised his voice a good deal above the safety
limit, and the quick crackle of rifle fire and the soaring lights told
that his voice had been heard, that the party or parties were
discovered or suspected.

The rest followed so quickly, the action was so rapid and
unpremeditated, that Ainsley never quite remembered its sequence. He
has a confused memory of seeing the wet ground illumined by many
lights, of drumming rifle fire and hissing bullets, and then,
immediately after, the rush and crash of a couple of German "Fizz-Bang"
shells. Probably it was the wet _plop_ of some of the backward-flung
bullets about him, possibly it was the movement of the German sergeant
that wiped out the instinctive desire to flatten himself close to
ground that drove him to instant action. The sergeant half lurched to