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6 Night Raid At the edge of the river we found a French officer and a couple of French soldiers waiting with a boat. The captain gave Jesse the end of a wire with a little piece of rope attached to it.He took the rope in his teeth, slipped into the water, and struck out. The captain whispered to me that Sergeant James was to land and pull the boat across with the four of us in it. I was to be in charge during the crossing; the rest was already arranged for. When we reached the opposite shore we were to hide the boat, go out and get our prisoner,and bring him back to the boat.Another wire connected the boat with our bank of the river. Two tugs on this wire would be the signal to the French soldiers to pull us back. By the time we’d got these instructions the wire had stopped moving .There was a little delay.Then it twitched, and the Frenchman who was paying it out grunted.“Bon!”he said.We got into the boat and lay down. Jesse pulled us across without a sound to give us away.19 The current had carried us so far downstream that when we landed we had to follow our wire some distance back before we found Jesse. He was standing in the water in the shadow of the bank. He’d been carried downstream too.We had to pull the boat along the river about forty yards before we found the point where the captain had told us a trail led up from the river bank. We moored the boat against the bank there,and Jesse led off,up the trail.I followed him closely,with Coske and the other two behind us.I could feel my heart beating whenever Jesse stopped for a moment. We had gone about a hundred and fifty steps when we heard what night raid 87 seemed to be a number of Germans coming toward us. We slipped to the side and crouched down in a little thicket. The Germans marched past within ten feet of us.From our crouched positions we could skyline them. They were big fellows, with rifles slung on their shoulders. They were wearing little flat caps and had their helmets fastened to their belts. There must have been twenty or thirty of them, and they made a lot of noise. They filed past us without a suspicion of anything wrong.We waited perhaps thirty seconds, then went ahead. Jesse placed Coske in front now.He was to stop the first German we met and begin to talk to him. While that was going on the rest of us were to slip up and knock him off. I followed Coske, and Jesse followed me. We were a hundred or more steps farther along the trail when we heard someone coming again. But this time it sounded as if there was only one. We slipped off the trail to the right and left, leaving Coske to meet him. When the German was quite close Coske challenged him in his own language. While they were talking the rest of us were closing in on him. He was completely fooled at first. But just as we were almost close enough to spring the trap Coske must have said something that made him suspicious. He jerked backward, and Coske jumped him. At the same instant I dived forward and caught his legs. Somebody—it must have been Jesse—walked all over my back and kicked me in the face.But he got hold of the German too.By this time the other men were all in the mix-up, and we’d got our man down. He was a great big sergeant; he must have weighed over two hundred pounds, and he was full of fight. But five against one was too much even for him. While he was on his feet he hadn’t tried to make an outcry, but the minute we had him on the ground he began to yell. Jesse got him by the throat, and I put the gag on him—though he nearly bit my finger off before I succeeded. The others tied up his arms and legs. I heard Wilson cursing because he’d lost one of his pistols. As soon as we’d finished trussing the German up, we started back [3.137.171.121] Project MUSE...

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