ttern; and you
could see places where a shell, striking such a wall a glancing blow,
had scaled it as a fish is scaled with a knife, leaving the bare wooden
ribs showing below. The next house, and the next, had been hit squarely
and plumply amidships, and they were gutted as fishes are gutted. One
house in twenty, perhaps, would be quite whole, except for broken
windows and fissures in the roof--as though the whizzing shells had
spared it deliberately.

I recall that of one house there was left standing only a breadth of
front wall between the places where windows had been. It rose in a
ragged column to the line of the roof-rafters--only, of course, there
was neither roof nor rafter now. On the face of the column, as though
done in a spirit of bitter irony, was posted a proclamation, signed by
the burgomaster and the military commandant, calling on the vanished
dwellers of this place to preserve their tranquillity.

On the side of the fort away from the city, and in the direction whence
we had come, a corporal's guard had established itself in a rent-asunder
house in order to be out of the wet. On the front of the house they had
hung a captured Belgian bugler's uniform and a French dragoon's
overcoat, which latter garment was probably a trophy brought back from
the lower lines of fighting; it made you think of an old-clothes-man's
shop. The corporal came forth to look at our passes before permitting
us to go on. He was a dumpy, good-natured-looking Hanoverian with
patchy saffron whiskers sprouting out on him.

"Ach! yes," he said in answer to my conductor's question. "Things are
quiet enough here now; but on Monday"--that would be three days before--
"we shot sixteen men here--rioters and civilians who fired on our
troops, and one grave-robber--a dirty hound! They are yonder."

He swung his arm; and following its swing we saw a mound of fresh-turned
clay, perhaps twenty feet in length, which made a yellow streak against
the green of a small inclosed pasture about a hundred yards away. We
saw many such mounds that day; and this one where the ignoble sixteen
lay was the shortest of the lot. Some mounds were fifty or sixty feet
in length. I presume there were distinguishing marks on the filled-up
trenches where the German dead lay, but from the automobile we could
make out none.

As we started on again, after giving the little Hanoverian the last
treasured copy of a paper we had managed to keep that long aga