"And this bombardment happens often?" I said.

"It happens always. Would you like to look at the railway
station? Of course, it has not been so bombarded as the
cathedral."

We went through the gross nakedness of streets without people,
till we reached the railway station, which was very fairly
knocked about, but, as my friends said, nothing like as much
as the cathedral. Then we had to cross the end of a long
street down which the Boche could see clearly. As one glanced
up it, one perceived how the weeds, to whom men's war is the
truce of God, had come back and were well established the
whole length of it, watched by the long perspective of open,
empty windows.



II

THE NATION'S SPIRIT AND A NEW INHERITANCE


We left that stricken but undefeated town, dodged a few miles
down the roads beside which the women tended their cows, and
dropped into a place on a hill where a Moroccan regiment of
many experiences was in billets.

They were Mohammedans bafflingly like half a dozen of our
Indian frontier types, though they spoke no accessible tongue.