Gerbeviller has taken to herself the title of "the martyr town"; an
honour to which many sister victims might dispute her claim! But as
a sensational image of havoc it seems improbable that any can
surpass her. Her ruins seem to have been simultaneously vomited up
from the depths and hurled down from the skies, as though she had
perished in some monstrous clash of earthquake and tornado; and it
fills one with a cold despair to know that this double destruction
was no accident of nature but a piously planned and methodically
executed human deed. From the opposite heights the poor little
garden-girt town was shelled like a steel fortress; then, when the
Germans entered, a fire was built in every house, and at the
nicely-timed right moment one of the explosive tabloids which the
fearless Teuton carries about for his land-_Lusitanias_ was tossed
on each hearth. It was all so well done that one wonders--almost
apologetically for German thoroughness--that any of the human rats
escaped from their holes; but some did, and were neatly spitted on
lurking bayonets.

One old woman, hearing her son's deathcry, rashly looked out of her
door. A bullet instantly laid her low among her phloxes and lilies;
and there, in her little garden, her dead body was dishonoured. It
seemed singularly appropriate, in such a scene, to read above a
blackened doorway the sign: "Monuments Funebres," and to observe
that the house the doorway once belonged to had formed the angle of
a lane called "La Ruelle des Orphelines."

At one end of the main street of Gerbeviller there once stood a
charming house, of the sober old Lorraine pattern, with low door,
deep roof and ample gables: it was in the garden of this house that
my pink peonies were picked for me by its owner, Mr. Liegeay, a