confusion it had caused, the Zeppelin, after letting fall a final bomb,
slowly rose and disappeared in the upper darkness.

The destruction wrought by the German projectiles was almost
incredible. The first shell, which I had seen fall, struck a building in
the Rue de la Bourse, barely two hundred yards in a straight line
from my window. A hole was not merely blown through the roof, as
would have been the case with a shell from a field-gun, but the three
upper stories simply crumbled, disintegrated, came crashing down
in an avalanche of brick and stone and plaster, as though a Titan
had hit it with a sledge-hammer. Another shell struck in the middle of
the Poids Public, or public weighing-place, which is about the size of
Russell Square in London. It blew a hole in the cobblestone-
pavement large enough to bury a horse in; one policeman on duty
at the far end of the square was instantly killed and another had
both legs blown off. But this was not all nor nearly all. Six people
sleeping in houses fronting on the square were killed in their beds
and a dozen others were more or less seriously wounded. Every
building facing on the square was either wholly or partially
demolished, the steel splinters of the projectile tearing their way
through the thick brick-walls as easily as a lead-pencil is jabbed
through a sheet of paper. And, as a result of the terrific concussion,
every house within a hundred yards of the square in every direction
had its windows broken. On no battlefield have I ever seen so
horrible a sight as that which turned me weak and nauseated when I
entered one of the shattered houses and made my way, over heaps
of fallen debris, to a room where a young woman had been
sleeping. She had literally been blown to fragments. The floor, the
walls, the ceiling, were splotched with--well, it's enough to say that
that woman's remains could only have been collected with a shovel.