Читать книгу Over There with the Marines at Chateau Thierry онлайн

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Suddenly—of course, for all explosions are sudden,—Phil was startled by the discharge of two rifles from behind a thicket twenty feet ahead. “Ping!” sung a bullet past his left ear. Tim was not startled. He did not know what hit him. Over he went, and Phil sprang behind a tree, as a true American, to meet the enemy Indian fashion.

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A bullet through his own body would not have given Phil as intense a pain as the one that struck Tim and apparently ended his career. But he was too good a soldier to let even so distressing an incident delay him in the duty of speedy self preservation.

And yet, swift though he was in springing behind a tree and bringing his rifle into position for firing, there were others just as speedy as he. Six men in gray uniforms, but decidedly un-uniform as to size and grace of physique, were standing out in full view with guns leveled at him.

Instinctively Phil’s hand moved an inch or two toward his hand-grenade sack. But it stopped almost with the impulse. He had used the last of his grenades half an hour before in the squad’s last fight that resulted in the extermination of one of the most obstinate of all the machine-gun nests in the woods. How he wished he had been more mindful of his supply while hurling those missiles at the enemy. Two of them, he recalled distinctly, had gone wide of their marks and represented a sheer waste of powder and shell. Oh, if he had only one of those grenades! With it he could produce such execution in that group of snipers that he could easily capture or finish with his rifle those not slain by the explosion of the hand missile. He was sure he could hurl a grenade accurately and at the same time keep his head and body fairly well protected from the enemy’s rifles behind the hole of the tree.