not true. Nothing is
cleared. The masses of crumbled stone remained, when they fled their
"battlefield."

The donjon was very high. It stood on a kind of bluff or elevation,
overlooking the country, and before the days of aeroplanes it might have
been used for observation. The donjon walls were 16 yards thick, not
feet, but yards! No other tower in Europe had those dimensions. They
tell a story about Mazarin. He deemed so strong a place, so near to
Paris, might be dangerous to the Crown; so he dismantled Coucy
militarily, without destroying its architectural beauty. The donjon
worried him in those days when artillery could make no impression on its
massive thickness. So Mazarin put 16 barrels of powder inside the tower,
and set them off. The tower just converted itself into gun barrel! The
powder blew out all the stories and the roof--shot them up like a gun
pointed at the sky! But the tower stood, exactly as before.

OF MASSIVE ARCHITECTURE.

The masonry was admittedly the heaviest achieved by the Middle Ages.
From the donjon extended three great vaulted halls. Massive buildings
continued. There was a Gothic chapel, a Tribunal Hall, the Hall of the
Nine Peers (whose statues remained), the Hall of the Nine Countesses
(whose medallion-portraits were carved on the monumental chimney). There
was a Romanesque chapel (relic from Charlemagne, like the original
donjon), the separate Fortified Chateau of the Chatelain (the Sire's
First Officer), and so on, and so on.

The retreating Germans have not only blown up Coucy, but that other
priceless relic, the Tower of the Grand Constable and the entire
historic Chateau of Ham, and equally the Castle of Peronne, a jewel of
beauty--all in one corner of the Vallois! On the smoking wreck of
Peronne, they left a humorous placard:

"Nicht aergen! Tur wundern! Don't be angry, just wonder!" Noyon and
Peronne are sacked and ruined. At Chauny 1800 houses out of 2500 were
deliberately burned, and at a distance they bombarded the remainder,
full of old folks and children whom they had parked there. All the
public buildings, churches, hospitals and poorhouse were blown up. Three
hundred towns and villages were burning at one time in this small
section of the Cradle of France. Hindenburg was at Roisel when they
rounded up the populations, went through their pockets for their money
(giving "receipts"), took their clothes off their backs (so that all the
American relief agencies in Paris w