defenses.

I am wrong there. We did not look at what was left of Fort Loncin.
Literally nothing was left of it. As a fort it was gone, obliterated,
wiped out, vanished. It had been of a triangular shape. It was of no
shape now. We found it difficult to believe that the work of human
hands had wrought destruction so utter and overwhelming. Where masonry
walls had been was a vast junk heap; where stout magazines had been
bedded down in hard concrete was a crater; where strong barracks had
stood was a jumbled, shuffled nothingness.

Standing there on the shell-torn hilltop, looking across to where the
Krupp surprise wrote its own testimonials at its first time of using, in
characters so deadly and devastating, I found myself somehow thinking of
that foolish nursery tale wherein it is recited that a pig built himself
a house of straw, and the wolf came; and he huffed and he puffed and he
blew the house down. The noncommissioned officer told us an unknown
number of the defenders, running probably into the hundreds, had been
buried so deeply beneath the ruins of the fort in the last hours of the
fighting that the Germans had been unable to recover the bodies. Even
as he spoke a puff of wind brought to our nostrils a smell which, once a
man gets it into his nose, he will never get the memory of it out again
so long as he has a nose. Being sufficiently sick, we departed thence.

As we rode back, and had got as far as the two ruined villages, it began
to rain very hard. The rain, as it splashed into the puddles, stippled
the farther reaches of the road thickly with dots, and its slanting
lines turned everything into one gray etching which you might have
labeled Desolation! And you would make no mistake in your labeling.
Then--with one of those tricks of deliberate drama by which Nature