e days, had grown used to the
signs of misery and waste and ruin, abundant and multiplying in the wake
of the hard-pounding hoofs of the conqueror.

Now, all of a sudden, I became aware that this town had been literally
shot to bits. From our side--that is to say, from the north and
likewise from the west--the Germans had shelled it. From the south,
plainly, the French had answered. The village, in between, had caught
the full force and fury of the contending fires. Probably the
inhabitants had warning; probably they fled when the German skirmishers
surprised that outpost of Frenchmen camping in the park. One imagined
them scurrying like rabbits across the fields and through the cabbage
patches. But they had left their belongings behind, all their small
petty gearings and garnishings, to be wrecked in the wrenching and
racking apart of their homes.

A railroad track emerged from the fields and ran along the one street.
Shells had fallen on it and exploded, ripping the steel rails from the
cross-ties, so that they stood up all along in a jagged formation, like
rows of snaggled teeth. Other shells, dropping in the road, had so
wrought with the stone blocks that they were piled here in heaps, and
there were depressed into caverns and crevasses four or five or six feet
deep.

Every house in sight had been hit again and again and again. One house
would have its whole front blown in, so that we could look right back to
the rear walls and see the pans on the kitchen shelves. Another house
would lack a roof to it, and the tidy tiles that had made the roof were
now red and yellow rubbish, piled like broken shards outside a potter's
door. The doors stood open, and the windows, with the windowpanes all
gone and in some instances the sashes as well, leered emptily, like
eye-sockets without eyes.

So it went. Two of the houses had caught fire and the interiors were
quite burned away. A sodden smell of burned things came from the still
smoking ruins; but the walls, being of thick stone, stood.

Our poor tired old nag halted and sniffed and snorted. If she had had
energy enough I reckon she would have shied about and run back the way
she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horses--a big gray and a
roan--with their stark legs sticking out across the road. The gray was
shot through and through in three places. The right fore hoof of the
roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with an ax; and
t