mans, and a
great many were dead. Estimates of the number of male inhabitants who
had been killed by the graycoats for offenses against the inflexible
code set up by the Germans in eastern Belgium varied. A cautious native
whispered that nine hundred of his fellow townsmen were "up there"--by
that meaning the trenches on the hills back of the town. A German
officer, newly arrived on the spot and apparently sincere in his efforts
to alleviate the misery of the survivors, told us that, judging by what
data he had been able to gather, between four and six hundred men and
youths of Dinant had fallen in the house-to-house conflicts between
Germans and civilians, or in the wholesale executions which followed the
subjugation of the place and the capture of such ununiformed
belligerents as were left.

In this instance subjugation meant annihilation. The lower part of the
town, where the well-to-do classes lived, was almost unscathed. Casual
shell-fire in the two engagements with the French that preceded the
taking of Dinant had smashed some cornices and shattered some windows,
but nothing worse befell. The lower half, made up mainly of the little
plaster-and-stone houses of working people, was gone, extinguished,
obliterated. It lay in scorched and crumbled waste; and in it, as we
rode through, I saw, excluding soldiers, just two living creatures. Two
children, both little girls, were playing at housekeeping on some stone
steps under a doorway where there was no door, using bits of wreckage
for furniture. We stopped a moment to watch them. They had small china
dolls.

The river, flowing placidly along between the artificial boundaries of
its stone quays, and the strange formation of cliffs, rising at the back
to the height of hundreds of feet, were as they had been. Soldiers
paddled on the water in skiffs and thousands of ravens flickered about
the pinnacles of the rocks, but between river and cliff there was
nothing but ruination--the graveyard of the homes of three thousand
people.

Yes, it was the graveyard not alone of their homes but of their
prosperity and their hopes and their ambitions and their aspirations--
the graveyard of everything human beings count worth having. This was
worse than Herve or Battice or Vise, or any of the leveled towns we had
seen. Taken on the basis of comparative size, it was worse even than
Louvain, as we discovered later. It was worse than anything I ever saw
--worse than any