hat night. There was never ten minutes' relief
from the drone of Gothas, who were making a complete job of Amiens.
It was at four in the morning that I met the same officer who saw me
wandering before.

"Let us go for a walk," he said. "The birds will be away by dawn."

It was nothing like dawn when we went out of the side door of the Hotel
du Rhin and strolled into the Street of the Three Pebbles. There was
still the same white moonlight, intense and glittering, but with a paler
sky. It shone down upon dark pools of blood and the carcasses of horses
and fragments of flesh, from which a sickly smell rose. The roadway
was littered with bits of timber and heaps of masonry. Many houses had
collapsed into wild chaos, and others, though still standing, had been
stripped of their wooden frontages and their walls were scarred by
bomb-splinters. Every part of the old city, as we explored it later, had
been badly mauled, and hundreds of houses were utterly destroyed. The
air raid ceased at 4.30 A.M., when the first light of dawn came into the
sky....

That day Amiens was evacuated, by command of the French military
authorities, and the inhabitants trailed out of the city, leaving
everything behind them. I saw the women locking up their shops--where
there were any doors to shut or their shop still standing. Many
people must have been killed and buried in the night beneath their own
houses--I never knew how many. The fugitives escaped the next phase of
the tragedy in Amiens when, within a few hours, the enemy sent over the
first high velocities, and for many weeks afterward scattered them about
the city, destroying many other houses. A fire started by these shells
formed a great gap between the rue des Jacobins and the rue des Trois
Cailloux, where there had been an arcade and many good shops and houses.
I saw the fires smoldering about charred beams and twisted ironwork when
I went through the city after the day of exodus.

XVII

It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the days of
its desolation, and we who had known its people so well hated its
loneliness. All abandoned towns have a tragic aspect--I often think
of Douai, which was left with all its people under compulsion of the
enemy--but Amiens was strangely sinister with heaps of ruins in its
narrow streets, and the abominable noise of high-velocity shells in
flight above its roofs, and crashing now in one direction and now in
another.

One of our s