part
of the protective casing of a gun mounted somewhere above. The missile
which wrecked the gun flung its armor down here. I searched my brain
for a simile which might serve to give a notion of the present state of
that steel jacket. I didn't find the one I wanted, but if you will
think of an earthenware pot which has been thrown from a very high
building upon a brick sidewalk you may have some idea of what I saw.

At that, it was no completer a ruin than any of the surrounding debris.
Indeed, in the whole vista of annihilation but two objects remained
recognizably intact, and these, strange to say, were two iron bed frames
bolted to the back wall of what I think must have been a barrack room
for officers. The room itself was no longer there. Brick, mortar,
stone, concrete, steel reinforcements, iron props, the hard-packed
earth, had been ripped out and churned into indistinguishable bits, but
those two iron beds hung fast to a discolored patch of plastering,
though the floor was gone from beneath them. Seemingly they were hardly
damaged. One gathered that a 42-centimeter shell possessed in some
degree the freakishness which we associate with the behavior of
cyclones.

We were told that at the last, when the guns had been silenced and
dismounted and the walls had been pierced and the embrasures blown
bodily away, the garrison, or what was left of it, fled to these
lowermost shelters. But the burrowing bombs found the refugees out and
killed them, nearly all, and those of them who died were still buried
beneath our feet in as hideous a sepulcher as ever was digged. There
was no getting them out from that tomb. The Crack of Doom will find
them still there, I guess.

To reach a portion of Des Sarts, as yet un-visited, we skirted the gape
of the crater, climbing over craggy accumulations of wreckage, and
traversed a tunnel with an arched roof and mildewed brick walls, like a
wine vault. The floor of it was littered with the knapsacks and water
bottles of dead or captured men, with useless rifles broken at the
stocks and bent in the barrels, and with suchlike riffle. At the far
end of the passage we came out into the open at the back side of the
fort.

"Right here," said the officer who was piloting us, "I witnessed a sight
which made a deeper impression upon me than anything I have seen in this
campaign. After the white flag had been hoisted by the survivors and we
had marched in, I halted my men just her