the age-old dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. A man's waistcoat
lay on the mud and part of a woman's stays: the waistcoat was black
and was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to see
on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these
days from peace.

A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of a
corner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was an
upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a
hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come
again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; the
hand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman's
dress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, the
laths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopes
men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come
too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway's
posture that ever a family would come home there again or tread those
steps once more. And, if in some far country one should hope, who has
not seen Albert, out of compassion for these poor people of France,
that where a staircase still remains there may be enough of a house
to shelter those who called it home again, I will tell one thing
more: there blew inside that house the same wind that blew outside,
the wind that wandered free over miles of plains wandered unchecked
through that house; there was no indoors or outdoors any more.

And on the wall of the room in which I stood, someone had proudly
written his regiment's name, The 156th Wurtemburgers. It was written
in chalk; and another man had come and had written two words before
it and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. And the writing
remains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silent