ble and boom. The town was
destroyed, wiped almost out of existence, save for heaps of rubble which
might have been houses or hills. But there were things to be seen which
would have made Jussy worth a long journey. It had been a prosperous
place, with one of the biggest sugar refineries in France, and the
wrecked _usine_ was as terrible and thrilling as the moon seen through
the biggest telescope in the world.

Not that it looked like the moon. It looked more like a futurist sketch,
in red and brown, of the heart of a cyclone; or of the inside of a
submarine that has rammed a skeleton ship on the stocks. But the sight
gave me the same kind of icy shock I had when I first saw the moon's
ravaged face through a huge telescope. _You_ took me, Padre, so you'll
remember.

If you came to Jussy, and didn't know about the war, you'd think you had
stumbled into hell--or else that you were having a nightmare and
couldn't wake up. I shall never forget a brobdingnagian boiler as big as
a battle tank, that had reared itself on its hind-legs to peer through a
_cheval de frise_ of writhing girders--tortured girders like a vast
wilderness of immense thorn bushes in a hopeless tangle, or a pit of
bloodstained snakes. The walls of the _usine_ have simply melted, and
it's hard to realize that it as a building, put up by human hands for
human uses, ever existed. There is a new Jussy, though, created since
the German retreat; and seeing it, you couldn't _help_ knowing that
there was a war! The whole landscape is full of cannon, big and little
and middle-sized. Queer mushroom buildings have sprung up, for officers'
and soldiers' barracks and canteens. Narrow plank walks built high above
mud-level--"duck boards," I think they're called--lead to the corrugated
iron, tin, and wooden huts. There are aerodromes and aerodromes like a
vast circus encampment, where there are not cannon; and the greenish
canvas roofs give the only bit of colour, as far as the eye can
see--unless one counts the soldiers' uniforms. All the rest is gray as
the desert before a dust-storm. Even the sky, which had been blue and
bright, was gray over Jussy, and the grayest of gray things were the
immense "_saucisses_"--three or four of them--hanging low under the
clouds like advertisements of titanic potatoes, haughtiest of war-time
vegetables.

Dierdre O'Farrell inadvertently called the big bulks "_saucissons_,"
which amused our officer guide so much that he laughed to