es built for children, with the
front open. They showed a bed with pillows, shelves supporting candles,
books, a washstand with basin and pitcher, a piano, and a reading-lamp.

In one house four stories had been torn away, leaving only the attic
sheltered by the peaked roof. To that height no one could climb, and
exposed to view were the collection of trunks and boxes familiar to all
attics. As a warning against rough handling, one of these, a woman's
hat-box, had been marked "Fragile." Secure and serene, it smiled down
sixty feet upon the mass of iron and bricks it had survived.

Of another house the roof only remained; from under it the rest of the
building had been shot away. It was as though after a soldier had been
blown to pieces, his helmet still hung suspended in mid-air.

In other streets it was the front that was intact, but when our captain
opened the street door we faced a cellar. Nothing beside remained. Or
else we stepped upon creaky floors that sagged, through rooms swept by
the iron brooms into vast dust heaps. From these protruded wounded
furniture--the leg of a table, the broken arm of a chair, a headless
statue.

[Illustration: _From a photograph by R. H. Davis._

"Of another house the roof only remained, from under it the rest of
the building had been shot away."]

From the debris we picked the many little heirlooms, souvenirs,
possessions that make a home. Photographs with written inscriptions,
post-cards bearing good wishes, ornaments for the centre-table,
ornaments for the person, images of the church, all crushed, broken,
and stained. Many shop-windows were still dressed invitingly as they
were when the shell burst, but beyond the goods exposed for sale was
only a deep hole.

The pure deviltry of a shell no one can explain. Nor why it spares a
looking-glass and wrecks a wall that has been standing since the twelfth
century.

In the cathedral the stone roof weighing hundreds of tons had fallen,
and directly beneath where it had been hung an enormous glass chandelier
untouched. A shell loves a shining mark. To what is most beautiful it
is most cruel. The Hotel de Ville, which was counted among the most
presentable in the north of France, that once rose in seven arches in
the style of the Renaissance, the shells marked for their own.

And all the houses approaching it from the German side they destroyed.
Not even those who once lived in them could say where they stood. There
is left on