a half off, at the other end of the
communication trench, when the automobiles emerged from their
shelter into the view of the captive balloon, the officers feared for the
automobiles, and we fled very swiftly.

We had been to the very front of the front, and it was the most
cheerful, confident, high-spirited place I had seen in France, or in
England either.

III Ruins

When you go into Rheims by the Epernay road, the life of the street
seems to be proceeding as usual, except that octroi formalities have
been abolished. Women, some young and beautiful, stare nonchalantly
as the car passes. Children are playing and shrieking in the
sunshine; the little cafes and shops keep open door; the baker is
busy; middle-aged persons go their ways in meditation upon existence.
It is true there are soldiers; but there are soldiers in every
important French town at all seasons of the year in peace-time.
In short, the spectacle is just that ordinarily presented to the
poorer exterior thoroughfares leading towards the centre of a city.

And yet, in two minutes, in less than two minutes, you may be in a
quarter where no life is left. This considerable quarter is not
seriously damaged--it is destroyed. Not many houses, but every
house in it will have to be rebuilt from the cellars. This quarter is
desolation. Large shops, large houses, small shops, and small
houses have all been treated alike. The facade may stand, the roof
may have fallen in entirely or only partially, floors may have
disappeared altogether or may still be clinging at odd angles to the
walls--the middle of every building is the same: a vast heap of what
once was the material of a home or a business, and what now is
foul rubbish. In many instances the shells have revealed the
functioning of the home at its most intimate, and that is seen which
none should see. Indignation rises out of the heart. Amid stacks of
refuse you may distinguish a bath, a magnificent fragment of mirror,
a piece of tapestry, a saucepan. In a funeral shop wreaths still hang
on their hooks for sale. Telephone and telegraph wires depend in a
loose tangle from the poles. The clock of the Protestant church has
stopped at a quarter to six. The shells have been freakish. In one
building a shell harmlessly made a hole in the courtyard large
enough to bury every commander of a German army; another
shell--a 210 mm.--went through an inner wall and opened up the
cellars by destroying 150 square fe