And the Germans, knowing this, and probably expecting far more of it from the extent to which it was done without hindrance or scruple by their own officers as well as men, with that cupidity born of vicious minds had time after time used this very weakness of men as a means to their sure and sudden destruction. In the dead of night they would send back electricians over the field on which a battle had raged, and, picking out German corpses, these workers would put cheap but costly-looking rings and other jewelry upon the dead men, and then attach these to wires, through which ran deadly electric currents as soon as the work was completed and the trap set. Any man of the opposing army advancing on the following day who so far succumbed to the temptation thus deliberately set, as to attempt to take off any of this seemingly valuable jewelry, instantly got a death-dealing shock which invariably threw him into the air with sparks shooting from his body, after which he fell to the ground a seared and scorched and eternally disgraced corpse himself. “They haven’t had time to doctor up any of those bodies along this route,” Ollie Ogden heard a man just ahead of him mutter, and looking up he recognized “Snooper” Jones, so nicknamed because he was constantly meddling in somebody else’s business and never attending to his own. He was the most despised man in the whole regiment for his lack of pride and patriotism, and knowing the feeling and lack of respect and esteem in which he was held, he did not seem in the least to care. Nobody knew just where “Snooper” Jones’ home was, if he had any, but it was known that he had been a draft dodger and that he had been picked up by Government agents along with half a dozen others of that cowardly and disreputable character in a raid conducted one cold night upon the loungers in a railroad station in one of the large eastern cities. In other words, “Snooper” Jones, to use a common expression, had been a bum. He was a drone bee in the industrial hive of organized society. He was a waster of his own time and energy and a burden upon others. He consumed without producing. He took, and gave nothing back. “I’d like to know,” an exhausted and exasperated lieutenant once had flung at “Snooper” Jones, “what your aim is in life.” And “Snooper,” consciously or unconsciously more truthful than he ever had been known to be before, answered, “I haven’t any.” The army, that great purifier and energizer of most men of “Snooper” Jones’ character, had failed to make any visible change in him. “Like the lily,” his top sergeant had said of him, “he toils not, neither does he spin. But unlike the lily, he is not good to look upon.”