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Didn't I stick 'im pritty, Bill"! It had been a common thing on the western front for a group of boches to come running toward the American lines unarmed, with their hands in the air, crying "Kamerad! Kamerad!" And then, when our men went out to receive them, fall flat, to make way for a force of armed boches immediately behind them, who opened fire plain murder as ever was done.
"Bill's ugly mug," he said at a later stage in the operations, when a head was found. As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches seemed immensely comic. Generals chuckled over it. Chaplains treasured it. How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney soldier who met a German soldier with his hands up, crying: "Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!"
Armstrong, so you understand now who he is shooting at. Very well, Pa," she added, calmly, "the rest of us will have our dessert now. You can get yours at Sam Coy's." The dessert was mince pie and a Boston frozen pudding, the latter an especial favorite of Captain Sam's. He capitulated at once. "'Kamerad! Kamerad!" he cried, holding up both hands.
And, as he bore her out of the high tower and descended the unlighted, interminable stairs of stone, he heard her weeping against his breast and softly asking intercession in behalf of a dead young man who had tried to be to her a "Kamerad" as he understood it including the entire gamut, from amorous beast to fiend. There was a single candle lighted in the bar of the White Doe.
It is best described by one of our boys who was lying on a table in a base hospital, waiting his turn to be operated upon, when he heard another who was being wheeled out from the operating room and was muttering through the ether fumes: "Fired at me ten feet away, he did, point blank, and then he dropped his rifle and stuck up his hands and called me 'Kamerad'! Kamerad, the dirty crook!
Travelling first class gives one more or less privacy in Holland, so that it was decidedly irritating to have a listener make for our compartment, while adjoining first-class compartments were entirely empty. If the intrusion resulted in our going to another compartment, an ever-ready Kamerad would quickly join us.
Tommy had a big Hun in one corner, and with his bayonet under his chin was trying to make him put his hands up. At first Fritzie didn't understand, but when at last it dawned on him his hands went up in a hurry, and he cried "Kamerad!" in the approved fashion. By this time all the Germans in sight had either been killed or taken prisoners, and a whole bunch were being herded back to our lines.
He opened the door with a kick, shut it behind him with a slam. The three at the table glanced at one another. "Say what ye like," grumbled Tim, "but me and that guy don't hold no mush party. I don't like his map. I don't like his manners. And he looks too much like the Fritz that shot me in the back with a kamerad gun after surrenderin'. I was in hospital three months.
The thing happened some time ago, before the "liveliness" died down along this secteur. One spring day, in a rainy fog like a gray curtain, a strange pair of legs appeared, prowling alongside a French trench. They were not French legs; but instantly two pairs of French arms darted out under the stage-drop of fog to jerk them in. Down came a feldwebel on top of them, squealing desolately "Kamerad!"
Through some rare oversight there was no Kamerad on hand, whereupon the man with the reddish hair followed us with the pathetically feeble-explanation that he, too, had made the same mistake.
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