"It was a pitiful sight," said Tom, continuing the tale of his experience while a captive. "One of the women wanted to write a message of farewell to her husband and children. They gave her paper and pencil, and one of the guards offered his back to rest the paper on while she wrote. At about every sentence, the guard let himself fall down and the woman stumbled over him. It was great fun for the rest of the gang. They laughed as if it were a show. Oh, I tell you, the Huns are great humorists!"
The eyes of the Army Boys flashed.
"The unspeakable beasts!" cried Frank.
"It would be a good thing if a plague came along and snuffed out the whole nation!" angrily exclaimed Bart.
"It might be a good thing for the rest of the world," agreed Tom. "And, by the way, speaking of plague, I don't know but what it's on the way even now. In one or two of the places I've been in there's a mysterious something that's killing off the people like sheep. I've heard the guards talking about it. Nobody seems to know what it is and the doctors themselves are all at sea. Only yesterday one of the guards was taken with it. Big husky fellow he was too, and yet in a couple of hours he was dead. Seems to work as quickly as the cholera and to be just as deadly. I hope it doesn't hit the American Army."
"It has hit it already," replied Frank soberly. "There's quite a lot of our boys in Coblenz who have died of it, and the officers are all up in the air about it. The medical staff is at its wit's end. I tell you, it's getting to be a mighty big problem."
"I wish we were out of the hoodooed country!" exclaimed Bart savagely. "The whole land seems to rest under a curse. When on earth will that treaty be signed so that we can go back to the States?"
"The Germans say that they're not going to sign it if it proves to be as severe as is reported," remarked Tom. "I've heard that said on every side."
"'They say' they're not," sneered Billy. "What does their 'they say' amount to? Nothing at all. They said they'd never stop fighting, and they lay down like dogs. They said we'd never step on the sacred soil of Germany, but there wasn't a peep out of them when we marched over the Rhine. They're the biggest bluffers and the quickest quitters in the world."
"When are we going back to Coblenz?" asked Tom.