nearly noon
Not that it was a town now in any real sense of the word . What had once been houses were now mere pitiful heaps of wood and stone and mortar , and their inhabitants had long since been dispossessed or slain . It stood gaunt and desolate and forbidding in its mute protest against the pitiless storm of war to which it had fallen a victim . In cleaning out a particularly obnoxious nest of machine gun positions Frank and his friends had been kept busy until nearly noon . But at last the guns were silenced and the crews wiped out or captured . The boys started to regain their main force , but the country was unfamiliar and they took a turning in the road which led toward the German lines instead of toward their own . `` Gee ! ''