Two days after securing this end of the line the German engineers had repaired the torn-up right-of-way and installed a complete acetylene outfit, and already they were dispatching trains of troops and munitions clear across southeastern Belgium to and from the German frontier.

When we heard this we quit marveling.

We had by now ceased to wonder at the lightning rapidity and un-human efficiency of the German military system in the field.
Under the sizzling acetylene torches we had our first good look at these prospective fellow-travelers of ours who were avowedly prisoners.
Considered in the aggregate they were not an inspiring spectacle.

A soldier, stripped of his arms and held by his foes, becomes of a sudden a pitiable, almost a contemptible object.

You think instinctively of an adder that has lost its fangs, or of a wild cat that, being shorn of teeth to bite with and claws to tear with, is now a more helpless, more impotent thing than if it had been created without teeth and claws in the first place.