CHAPTER XXI.
BOMBARDED BY A ZEPPELIN.
Shortly afterwards the two boys said good-bye to their host and his wife, and started out to find headquarters in Ypres. They quickly discovered that the badly battered town was full of marching soldiers, and all the other things that go hand in hand with modern war, even to a number of armored cars which sped past them on the road, exciting the wonder of Amos greatly.
“Why, just see how they’ve managed to build up that metal shield around the men aboard, Jack! They seem to be safe from ordinary bullets fired by a machine gun. There were two Maxims aboard that last car, I noticed.”
“Yes,” added the other, deeply interested, “fighting today begins to take on some of the old-time ways. You’d almost think of Roman chariots to see those cars flying along the road, only the galloping horses have been displaced by a power a hundred times more powerful. But there must have been some pretty warm engagements around this town, if the battered walls can tell the story.”
“Huh! it doesn’t look to me worth the powder that’s been wasted,” remarked Amos. “Why should both Germans and the Allies want to get and hold possession of Ypres, I’d like to know? Thousands must have fallen here, because everywhere you look you see those mounds where the dead have been buried.”
“They consider it a place of strategic importance, which is the only explanation I can give you,” Jack observed. “Perhaps it’s what we’d call a railway center over in the States. Then the only good road leading to Dunkirk and the Channel runs out from Ypres; and you know the Kaiser is dead set on getting his army where he can throw those shells over on to the shore of England. That mania with him has cost pretty much all this terrible slaughter.”
Amos shook his head as though his feelings overpowered him. He must have been thinking that human life was held pretty cheaply when it could be thus thrown away for a freak idea, a pet object of revenge that in the end could not amount to much so far as ending the war was concerned.
Of course, the two boys aroused considerable curiosity. It was only natural that this should be so. Dozens of the soldiers, humming Tipperary as they strode past in ranks, usually heading toward the fighting zone, waved a hand toward them in friendly greeting; and the chums invariably gave an answering salute.
“I guess they think we’re English boys,” suggested Amos, when this had happened a number of times. “They know from our looks, and the fact of our being here, we can never be German anyhow.”