civilians in the place, and at the sausage and beer lunch the
conversation was based on the "wanton destruction by the beasts of
an innocent town."

After they had drunk so much beer that they both fell asleep I
slipped quietly away and went about amid the ruins. I came upon
human bodies burned to a crisp. Heaps of empty cartridge shells
littered the ground, which I examined with astonishment for they
were Russian, not German, shells, and must have been used by men
defending the town.

I met a pretty girl of seventeen drawing water at a well, who had
remained during the three weeks that the Russians were there to
care for her invalid father, and had not suffered the slightest
insult. Yet all my informants had told me that the Russians had
spared none of the weaker sex who had remained in their path.

Further investigations had revealed that the Russians had not fired
a shot upon the town, but that the Germans had destroyed it driving
them out.

I entered a little Roman Catholic church in the undamaged section
of the town and noted with interest that nothing had apparently
been disturbed--this the more significant since the Russians hold a
different faith.

I walked back towards the river and strolled through the neat,
well-shaded, churchyard to the ruins of the large church, the
dominating feature of the town. It was clear from what was left
that the lines of the body and the spire had been of rare beauty