"Thank goodness I did," was Schnitzel's fervent response. "I'd hate to feel that I had a single tie that bound me to these cursed, butchering Boches. If some of the Germans in the U. S. could really be made to believe what we've seen with our own eyes, it would give 'em a jolt."
"They don't want to believe," Bob cried out scornfully. "But wait awhile. If some German-American father whose son got in the draft and was sent over here gets word that his boy has been crucified or tortured by a delegation of Fatherland friends, he'll wake up in a hurry."
"Yes," nodded Schnitzel, "when the chickens begin to come home to roost, it's going to make some difference in the way these German fanatics at home feel about this war."
Greeted on every side by evidence of havoc and devastation wrought by the enemy, the talk of the strollers remained centered on the war. In the home camps and on shipboard they had discussed it but little, preferring to keep it in the background. Now they were so near to the great conflict it could no longer be ignored. It had become the one vital topic of conversation.
"Let's go into that wreck and see what it looks like inside," proposed Roger at last.
Proceeding in an opposite direction from their camp, they had walked the breadth of the village, and were well toward the open country. Standing by itself in a field, the broken stone walls of a shelled cottage had attracted Roger's attention.
"I'll go you," was Bob's ready response.
"I'm game," agreed Jimmy.
"So would I it to see," assented Ignace. "Yet think I there is no mooch by it, only the many stone and mooch roobish."
Circling the wrecked cottage for a place by which to enter it with the least effort, the explorers climbed over a heap of debris, which partially blocked a doorless aperture at the rear, and gained the interior.