at the interiors. Once in a while one had been thrown flat. Probably
big guns operated here. In such a case there was an avalanche of broken
masonry cascading out into the roadway.

Midway of the mile-long avenue of utter waste which we now traversed we
came on a sort of small square. Here was the yellow village church. It
lacked a spire and a cross, and the front door was gone, so we could see
the wrecked altar and the splintered pews within. Flanking the church
there had been a communal hall, which was now shapeless, irredeemable
wreckage. A public well had stood in the open space between church and
hall, with a design of stone pillars about it. The open mouth of the
well we could see was choked with foul debris; but a shell had struck
squarely among the pillars and they fell inward like wigwam poles,
forming a crazy apex. I remember distinctly two other things: a picture
of an elderly man with whiskers--one of those smudged atrocities that
are called in the States crayon portraits--hanging undamaged on the
naked wall of what had been an upper bedroom; and a wayside shrine of
the sort so common in the Catholic countries of Europe. A shell had hit
it a glancing blow, so that the little china figure of the Blessed
Virgin lay in bits behind the small barred opening of the shrine.

Of living creatures there was none. Heretofore, in all the blasted
towns I had visited, there was some human life stirring. One could
count on seeing one of the old women who are so numerous in these
Belgian hamlets--more numerous, I think, than anywhere else on earth.
In my mind I had learned to associate such a sight with at least one old
woman--an incredibly old woman, with a back bent like a measuring
worm's, and a cap on her scanty hair, and a face crosshatched with a
million wrinkles--who would be pottering about at the back of some half-
ruined house or maybe squatting in a desolated doorway staring at us