uilding that had been struck would topple into the street in a
cascade of brick and stone and plaster. It was not until Thursday
night, however, that the Germans brought their famous forty-two-
centimetre guns into action. The effect of these monster cannon
was appalling. So tremendous was the detonation that it sounded
as though the German batteries were firing salvoes. The projectiles
they were now raining upon the city weighed a ton apiece and had
the destructive properties of that much nitroglycerine. We could
hear them as they came. They made a roar in the air which
sounded at first like an approaching express train, but which rapidly
rose in volume until the atmosphere quivered with the howl of a
cyclone. Then would come an explosion which jarred the city to its
very foundations.

Over the shivering earth rolled great clouds of dust and smoke.
When one of these terrible projectiles struck a building it did not
merely tear away the upper stories or blow a gaping aperture in its
walls: the whole building crumbled, disintegrated, collapsed, as
though flattened by a mighty hand. When they exploded in the open
street they not only tore a hole in the pavement the size of a cottage
cellar, but they sliced away the facades of all the houses in the
immediate vicinity, leaving their interiors exposed, like the interiors
upon a stage. Compared with the "forty-twos" the shell and shrapnel
fire of the first night's bombardment was insignificant and harmless.
The thickest masonry was crumpled up like so much cardboard.
The stoutest cellars were no protection if a shell struck above them.
It seemed as though at times the whole city was coming down about
our ears. Before the bombardment had been in progress a dozen
hours there was scarcely a street in the southern quarter of the city--
save only the district occupied by wealthy Germans, whose houses
remained untouched--which was not obstructed by heaps of fallen
masonry. The main thoroughfares were strewn with fallen electric
light and trolley wires and shattered poles and branches lopped
from trees. The sidewalks were carpeted with broken glass. The air
was heavy with the acrid fumes of smoke and powder. Abandoned
dogs howled mournfully before the doors of their deserted homes.
From a dozen quarters of the city columns of smoke by day and
pillars of fire by night rose against the sky.

Owing to circumstances--fortunate or unfortunate, as one chooses
to view them--I was not in