Not that they did not fight, for they did. The resistance to the American and Allied advance was stiff and formidable, but it was overcome, and immense losses inflicted on the Huns as they made counter-attack after counter-attack.
It was one day, after some of the most severe fighting of the war that they had ever seen, that the battalion, in which Ned, Bob, and Jerry then were, crossed a little stream, driving the desperately defending Germans beyond it, and entered a small French village. When the echo of the shots had died away, and it was seen that the Huns 244 were in full retreat, the three chums and their comrades, at the head of a victorious force, marched down the main street of the quaint and ancient little town.
Forth from their hiding places came the French population, weary and scarred from four years of enemy occupation. Here and there the tricolor, so long hidden, waved in the wind. The hated and dastardly Germans had departed, never, please God, to come again!
Forward, into the recaptured town, marched Ned, Bob, Jerry, and their comrades in arms. With tears in their eyes the French people watched the Americans come. It was the day so long prayed for.
Near one of the half-ruined houses, which had been their abode—their prison, in fact, since their capture,—stood Professor Snodgrass and the two young ladies.
“Oh, can you believe it, Gladys!” exclaimed Miss Gibbs. “It doesn’t seem possible, does it, that we are saved?”
“No, but I am beginning to believe that it is not a dream any more. Those American soldiers are real, aren’t they?”
“They are, indeed, young ladies,” said the professor. “At last I shall be able to go back to my collection, and finish, I hope, the moving pictures of insects under the influence of big guns. Oh, I 245 shall also hope to take you to safety with me,” he added, as he thought of his wards. “If only the boys were here!”
“What boys do you mean?” asked Miss Petersen. “You have so often spoken of ‘the boys,’ but you have never mentioned who they were.”
And this was true, for, just as the professor had been on the point of doing so, he and the girls had been captured by the Germans, and, since then, he had not had the heart to speak of his friends.