were looking for a town that lives under shell-fire. The
regular road to it was reported unhealthy--not that the women
and children seemed to care. We took byways of which certain
exposed heights and corners were lightly blinded by
wind-brakes of dried tree-tops. Here the shell holes were rather
thick on the ground. But the women and the children and the
old men went on with their work with the cattle and the crops;
and where a house had been broken by shells the rubbish was
collected in a neat pile, and where a room or two still
remained usable, it was inhabited, and the tattered
window-curtains fluttered as proudly as any flag. And time was
when I used to denounce young France because it tried to kill
itself beneath my car wheels; and the fat old women who
crossed roads without warning; and the specially deaf old men
who slept in carts on the wrong side of the road! Now, I
could take off my hat to every single soul of them, but that
one cannot traverse a whole land bareheaded. The nearer we
came to our town the fewer were the people, till at last we
halted in a well-built suburb of paved streets where there was
no life at all. . . .

A WRECKED TOWN

The stillness was as terrible as the spread of the quick busy
weeds between the paving-stones; the air smelt of pounded
mortar and crushed stone; the sound of a footfall echoed like
the drop of a pebble in a well. At first the horror of
wrecked apartment-houses and big shops laid open makes one
waste energy in anger. It is not seemly that rooms should be
torn out of the sides of buildings as one tears the soft heart
out of English bread; that villa roofs should lie across iron
gates of private garages, or that drawing-room doors should
flap alone and disconnected between two emptinesses of twisted
girders. The eye wearies of the repeated pattern that burst
shells make on stone walls, as the mouth sickens of the taste
of mortar and charred timber. One quarter of the place had
been shelled nearly level; the facades of the houses stood
doorless, roofless, and windowless like stage scenery. This
was near the cathedral, which is always a favourite mark for
the heathen. They had gashed and ripped the sides of the
cathedral itself, so that the birds flew in and out at will;
they had smashed holes in the roof; knocked huge cantles out
of the buttresses, and pitted and starred the paved square
outside. They were at work, too, that very afternoon, though
I do no