"If you like, Franz," replied Klitzing.
"Then we won't," said Vogt. "You ought to say at once when you don't like a thing. I don't in the least want to go myself, and we can always get beer in the canteen. We'll just walk a bit through the wood as far as the butts, shall we?"
Klitzing assented, and they waited till their comrades were off, then strolled slowly into the cool forest. Troops of men were leaving the camp gates to walk by the hard high road towards the villages that could be seen in the distance. Vogt looked after the cloud of dust they made.
"Can you understand what they see in women?" he asked.
"No, indeed I can't."
"You don't care about women?"
The clerk shook his head. "And you, Franz?" he inquired.
"Not I. At any rate, not yet."
Walking on in the shade of the forest's edge they came at last to the butts. The black, tarred, wooden target had been put up ready for the next day, and cheerfully awaited the terrors of the firing that lay before it. A little to one side of the principal erection a ruined village stood out against the blue of the summer sky. It had been purchased by the Government and left standing to be used for testing the effect of shots upon buildings.
The shells had certainly done their work. Substantial walls had gaping fissures right through them; gables and chimney-stacks had been laid low. Some of the houses seemed to have been set on fire by the shots, and any wood-work spared by the devouring flames had been stolen and carried away by some-one or other. No stairs were left leading to the upper storeys, nor boards to any of the floors. Rafters and beams had been hewn down; doors and windows with their frames had been torn out. On some of the walls rude drawings had been scrawled in paint or red chalk, with facetious inscriptions and obscene jokes; but from most of them the whitewash had fallen, leaving bare the rough masonry. It was a depressing picture of desolation. One could almost imagine that the smell of burning still hung about.