nt but charged with pathos. We halted for a
moment in the open space before the railroad station, a comparatively new
structure of steel and glass, designed on geometrical curves, with an
uninspiring, cheaply ornamented front. It had been, undoubtedly, the
pride of the little city. Yet finding it here had at first something of
the effect of the discovery of an office-building--let us say--on the
site of the Reims Cathedral. Presently, however, its emptiness, its
silence began to have their effects--these and the rents one began to
perceive in the roof. For it was still the object of the intermittent
yet persistent fire of the German artillery. One began to realize that
by these wounds it had achieved a dignity that transcended the mediocre
imagination of its provincial designer. A fine rain had set in before
we found the square, and here indeed one felt a certain desolate
satisfaction; despite the wreckage there the spirit of the ancient town
still poignantly haunted it. Although the Hotel de Ville, which had
expressed adequately the longings and aspirations, the civic pride of
those bygone burghers, was razed to the ground, on three sides were still
standing the varied yet harmonious facades of Flemish houses made
familiar by photographs. Of some of these the plaster between the carved
beams had been shot away, the roofs blown off, and the tiny hewn rafters
were bared to the sky. The place was empty in the gathering gloom of the
twilight. The gaiety and warmth of the hut erected in the Public Gardens
which houses the British Officers' Club were a relief.

The experiences of the next day will remain for ever in my memory etched,
as it were, in sepia. My guide was a younger officer who had seen heroic
service, and I wondered constantly how his delicate frame had survived in
the trenches the constant hardship of such weather as now, warmly wrapped
and with the car-curtains drawn, we faced. The inevitable, relentless
rain of that region had set in again, the rain in which our own soldiers
will have to fight, and the skies were of a darkness seldom known in
America. The countryside was no longer smiling. After some two hours of
progress we came, in that devastated district near the front, to an
expanse where many monsters were clumsily cavorting like dinosaurs in
primeval slime. At some distance from the road others stood apparently
tethered in line, awaiting their turn for exercise. These were the
far-famed