brought up the forty-twos.

We entered in through a breach in the first parapet and crossed, one at
a time, on a tottery wooden bridge which was propped across a fosse half
full of rubble, and so came to what had been the heart of the fort of
Des Sarts. Had I not already gathered some notion of the powers for
destruction of those one-ton, four-foot-long shells, I should have said
that the spot where we halted had been battered and crashed at for
hours; that scores and perhaps hundreds of bombs had been plumped into
it. Now, though, I was prepared to believe the German captain when he
said probably not more than five or six of the devil devices had struck
this target. Make it six for good measure. Conceive each of the six as
having been dammed by a hurricane and sired by an earthquake, and as
being related to an active volcano on one side of the family and to a
flaming meteor on the other. Conceive it as falling upon a man-made,
masonry-walled burrow in the earth and being followed in rapid
succession by five of its blood brethren; then you will begin to get
some fashion of mental photograph of the result. I confess myself as
unable to supply any better suggestion for a comparison. Nor shall I
attempt to describe the picture in any considerable detail. I only know
that for the first time in my life I realized the full and adequate
meaning of the word chaos. The proper definition of it was spread
broadcast before my eyes.

Appreciating the impossibility of comprehending the full scope of the
disaster which here had befallen, or of putting it concretely into words
if I did comprehend it, I sought to pick out small individual details,
which was hard to do, too, seeing that all things were jumbled together
so. This had been a series of cunningly buried tunnels and arcades,
with cozy subterranean dormitories opening off of side passages, and
still farther down there had been magazines and storage spaces. Now it
was all a hole in the ground, and the force which blasted it out had
then pulled the hole in behind itself. We stood on the verge, looking
downward into a chasm which seemed to split its way to infinite depths,
although in fact it was probably not nearly so deep as it appeared. If
we looked upward there, forty feet above our heads, was a wide riven gap
in the earth crust.

Near me I discerned a litter of metal fragments. From such of the
scraps as retained any shape at all, I figured that they had been