They had not gone many more yards, picking their way from knoll to knoll, when they began to sense something of the real horror of warfare as the Germans waged it. Sticking out here and there above the surface of the ground like grim and ghastly monuments were battered heaps of stone and mortar—all that remained of houses which once had stood there. This site had been a village once! But what ruin had been wrought there! What scenes of carnage, of brutality and outright murder had been enacted here upon this spot that the Americans were now traversing? How many innocent noncombatants—aged men and women, defenseless little children—had had their lives snuffed out, or were tortured to death, or were driven like haunted wild beasts before that relentless, pitiless advance of the Boches four years before? Tom Walton, asking himself these things, horrified by the thoughts and the terrible picture they conjured, even as he threw himself forward with the rest could not help comparing this barren desolation of what once had been a thriving, happy, harmless community, with the peace and quiet of his own country, even though it was at war, and with the content and safety which he and his kin always had known there. To Tom the wretched scene about him was like a terrible nightmare, and yet he knew that it was in fact all too tragic reality. Unquestionably the day—not _Der Tag_, of which the Germans had so brutally and boastfully spoken for four long years—but a far different day, the Day of Retribution, was now near at hand. It could not come too swiftly or severely to avenge the horrors which German invasion, Hun brutality and Boche atrocity had inflicted upon the people and the land of Belgium and eastern France. Stirring as were these reflections, thrown with lightning-like rapidity across the mind of Tom Walton and perhaps scores of others who were fighting side by side with him, they were but passing thoughts which speedily gave way to the stern and hazardous realities of the moment as a hail of machine bullets from a dozen hidden nests again challenged, and for a time halted, their further advance. It was another of those long, narrow, intermittent stretches of wooded land that they were approaching, and somehow, by the exertion of almost superhuman efforts, the Germans had thrown a hasty but temporarily effective barbed wire entanglement in front of it. It was another of those obstacles which cost lives to overcome, but which had to be thrown aside with the least delay in order that the enemy might not have time to marshal a recouped strength against the oncoming line.