and asked the farmer’s wife for a cup of coffee,—­to sell me a cup, which she refused; in fact, her husband would not permit any of us to enter the house again.  Then a smothering fire smashed the French battery, the destruction being so accurate and complete that it was done while I was asking and being refused the coffee!  Just leaving the house, I met one of the French captains.  “Did you notice anything peculiar in the farmer’s actions?” he asked me; “I mean, with his white cow?”

“I told him I hadn’t noticed anything peculiar, that I had noticed he had taken his white cow out in front of our battery, grazing her there just before the battery was shot up.

“Did the cow stop in front of your gun?”

“Yes, it stopped before each one of them.”

“So it did at ours,” he said.

“Merci Monsieur, you will hear from this.”  And he left in a hurry.  He phoned the gendarmes in the city of Ypres and in less than half-an-hour they came.  They entered the farmhouse and searched it thoroughly.  Upstairs they found parts of a heliograph lamp and a complete telephone apparatus; there was also in his stove a system that had been inaugurated for forcing up a shower of sparks; this apparatus had been found in the houses of a number of spies who had paid the penalty for their work.  Then they made a search of the cellar in which were found hundreds of tins of beef and jam, all of which had come from our rations, and then was explained the mysterious disappearance of our grub.  There was no trace to be found of our Algerian trooper; he had made a hasty exit.

Friend farmer and his wife were arrested, taken away with the children and placed in the coop, and there the traitorous couple got their deserts—­they were taken to the square and shot.

After they had gone we made ourselves at home in the building, and the comforts that awaited us there made us feel almost glad that they had turned out to be spies.  Among the rations we found that they had taken stuff that had been purloined from other units as far back as three months before.  After a thorough ransacking and a feed that filled us to our heart’s content, we made for the battery, being greeted with a fresh outburst on our arrival, and under the fire we pulled our remaining guns away to another hedge 200 yards off, and waited for the storm to settle.

While lying there the brains of one of our geniuses got to working and his ideas were quickly resolved into action.  We went down to the barn, took a couple of wagons, taking off the wheels and the poles, and made up three dummy guns and placed them in the spot we had left, and in a few minutes’ time we had the satisfaction of seeing Fritz spend three or four hundred good shells on our dummy battery.

A consuming thirst was parching my mouth and I took a chance and ran along the open to the house for a drink.  Then it was that the disadvantageous side of our good work with the dummy guns was exemplified; just as I was stepping out of the door, a shell tore a hole in one corner of the building, knocking it out as clean as if it had been drilled.