entered, but a few stout raps on the
counter brought a woman, pale-faced but volubly chattering, up a ladder
and through a trapdoor in the shop-floor. She served them while the
shells still moaned overhead, talking rapidly, apologizing for keeping
them waiting, and explaining that for the children's sake she always
went down into the cellar when the shelling commenced, wishing them, as
they gathered up their parcels and left, "bonne chance," and making for
the trap-door and the ladder as they closed the shop-door.

About the main streets there were few signs of the shells' work, except
here and there a litter of fragments tossed over the roofs and sprayed
across the road. But, passing through a small side square, the two
officers saw something more of the effect of "direct hits." In the
square was parked a number of ambulance wagons, and over a building at
the side floated a huge Red Cross flag. Eight or nine shells had been
dropped in and around the square. Where they had fallen were huge round
holes, each with a scattered fringe of earth and cobble-stones and
broken pavement. The trees lining the square showed big white patches
on their trunks where the bark had been sliced by flying fragments,
branches broken, hanging and dangling, or holding out jagged white
stumps. Leaves and twigs and branches were littered about the square
and heaped thick under the trees. The brick walls of many of the houses
round were pitted and pocked and scarred by the shell fragments. The
face of one house was marked by a huge splash, with solid center and a
ragged-edged outline of radiating jerky rays, reminding one immediately
of a famous ink-maker's advertisement. The bricks had taken the
impression of the explosion's splash exactly as paper would take the
ink's. Practically every window in the square had been broken, and in
the case of the splash-marked house, blown in, sash and frame complete.
One ambulance wagon lay a torn and splintered wreck, and pieces of it
were flung wide to the four corners of the square. Another was
overturned, with broken wheels collapsed under it, and in the Red Cross
canvas tilts of others gaped huge tears and rents.

At one spot a pool of blood spread wide across the pavement, and still
dripping and running sluggishly and thickly into and along the stone
gutter, showed where at least one shell had caught more than brick and
stone and tree, although now the square was deserted and empty of life.

And even