g of a gun at night. The rain gave a peculiar
hollowness to the concussion. The Belgian and French batteries were
silent.

We seemed to have walked endless miles, and still there was no little
town. We went over a bridge, and on its flat floor I stopped and
rested my aching feet.

"Only a little farther now," said the British officer cheerfully.

"How much farther?"

"Not more than a mile,"

By way of cheering me he told me about the town we were
approaching--how the road we were on was its main street, and that the
advanced line of trenches crossed at the railroad near the foot of the
street.

"And how far from that are the German trenches?" I asked nervously.

"Not very far," he said blithely. "Near enough to be interesting."

On and on. Here was a barn.

"Is this the town?" I asked feebly.

"Not yet. A little farther!"

I was limping, drenched, irritable. But now and then the absurdity of
my situation overcame me and I laughed. Water ran down my head and off
my nose, trickled down my neck under my coat. I felt like a great
sponge. And suddenly I remembered my hat.

"I feel sure," I said, stopping still in the road, "that the chauffeur
will go inside the car out of the rain and sit on my hat."

The officer thought this very likely. I felt extremely bitter about
it. The more I thought of it the more I was convinced that he was
exactly the sort of chauffeur who would get into a car and sit on an
only hat.

At last we came to the town--to what had been a town. It was a town no
longer. Walls without roofs, roofs almost without walls. Here and
there only a chimney standing of what had been a home; a street so
torn up by shells that walking was almost impossible--full of
shell-holes that had become graves. There were now no lights, not even
soldiers. In the silence our footsteps re-echoed against those
desolate and broken walls.

A day or two ago I happened on a description of this town, written by
a man who had seen it at the time I was there.

"The main street," he writes, "is like a great museum of prehistoric
fauna. The house roofs, denuded of tiles and the joists left naked,
have tilted forward on to the sidewalks, so that they hang in mid-air
like giant vertebrae.... One house only of the whole village of ----
had been spared."

We stumbled down the street toward the trenches and at last stopped
before a house. Through boards nailed across what had once been
windows a few rays of light escaped.