Bermondsey _versus_ Wurtemburg

The trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceased
altogether, and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of the ghosts of
murdered trees, all grey and deserted.

Descending into Albert past trees in their agony we came all at once
on the houses. You did not see them far off as in other cities; we
came on them all at once as you come on a corpse in the grass.

We stopped and stood by a house that was covered with plaster marked
off to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, the
slates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel.
Near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway
bridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as
though it had gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay one
of the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there upon
some flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it had
been a slender cane that someone had shoved too hard into the earth.

There had been a force abroad in Albert that could do these things,
an iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical
contrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a
moment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal.

When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come down
upon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped and
withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and in
that attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcome
by disaster.