a force abroad in Albert that could do these things,
an iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical
contrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a
moment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal.

When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come down
upon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped and
withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and in
that attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcome
by disaster.

Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins,
fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which
they had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a
crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London
shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap
knife sticking up from a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is long
out of fashion.

The stale smell of war arose from the desolation.

A British helmet dinted in like an old bowler, but tragic not absurd,
lay near a barrel and a teapot.

On a wall that rose above a heap of dirty and smashed rafters was
written in red paint KOMPe I.M.B.K. 184. The red paint had dripped
down the wall from every letter. Verily we stood upon the scene of
the murder.

Opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces of
a pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of
grapes and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outside
the door.

Perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. I entered the
house and looked round.

A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, only
chipped at the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. There were
pretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was like
the age-old dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. A man's waistcoat
lay on the mud and part of a woman's stays: the waistcoat was black
and was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to see
on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these
days from peace.

A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of a
corner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was an
upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a
hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come
again and seek sleep at evening by way of those b