few waybills and excursion placards
which still showed here and there looked unutterably forlorn. In the
booking office was a confusion of broken desks, stools and overthrown
chairs, the floor littered with sodden books and ledgers, but the
racks still held thousands of tickets, bearing so many names they
might have taken any one anywhere throughout fair France once, but
now, it seemed, would never take any one anywhere.

All at once, through the battered swing doors, marched a company of
soldiers, the tramp of their feet and the lilt of their voices
filling the place with strange echoes, for, being wet and weary and
British, they sang cheerily. Packs a-swing, rifles on shoulder, they
tramped through shell-torn waiting room and booking hall and out
again into wind and wet, and I remember the burden of their chanting
was: "Smile! Smile! Smile!"

In a little while I stood amid the ruins of the great cathedral; its
mighty pillars, chipped and scarred, yet rose high in air, but its
long aisles were choked with rubble and fallen masonry, while through
the gaping rents of its lofty roof the rain fell, wetting the
shattered heap of particoloured marble that had been the high altar
once. Here and there, half buried in the debris at my feet, I saw
fragments of memorial tablets, a battered corona, the twisted remains
of a great candelabrum, and over and through this mournful ruin a
cold and rising wind moaned fitfully. Silently we clambered back over
the mountain of debris and hurried on, heedless of the devastation
around, heartsick with the gross barbarity of it all.

They tell me that churches and cathedrals must of necessity be
destroyed since they generally serve as observation posts. But I have
seen many ruined churches--usually beautified by Time and hallowed by
tradition--that by reason of site and position could never have been
so misused--and then there is the beautiful Chateau d'Eau!

Evening was falling, and as the shadows stole upon this silent city,
a gloom unrelieved by any homely twinkle of light, these dreadful
streets, these stricken homes took on an aspect more sinister and
forbidding in the half-light. Behind those flapping curtains were
pits of gloom full of unimagined terrors whence came unearthly
sounds, stealthy rustlings, groans and sighs and sobbing voices. If
ghosts did flit behind those crumbling walls, surely they were very
sad and woeful ghosts.

"Damn this rain!" murmured K. gently.

"And t