y on
the town, Every house was shuttered and the streets were empty. We
drove to the Place Jean Bart, where two days ago we sat at tea in
the hall of the hotel. Now there was not a whole pane of glass in
the windows of the square, the doors of the hotel were closed, and
every now and then some one came out carrying a basketful of plaster
from fallen ceilings. The whole surface of the square was literally
paved with bits of glass from the hundreds of broken windows, and at
the foot of David's statue of Jean Bart, just where our motor had
stood while we had tea, the siege-gun of Dixmude had scooped out a
hollow as big as the crater at Nieuport.

Though not a house on the square was touched, the scene was one of
unmitigated desolation. It was the first time we had seen the raw
wounds of a bombardment, and the freshness of the havoc seemed to
accentuate its cruelty. We wandered down the street behind the hotel
to the graceful Gothic church of St. Eloi, of which one aisle had
been shattered; then, turning another corner, we came on a poor
_bourgeois_ house that had had its whole front torn away. The
squalid revelation of caved-in floors, smashed wardrobes, dangling
bedsteads, heaped-up blankets, topsy-turvy chairs and stoves and
wash-stands was far more painful than the sight of the wounded
church. St. Eloi was draped in the dignity of martyrdom, but the
poor little house reminded one of some shy humdrum person suddenly
exposed in the glare of a great misfortune.

A few people stood in clusters looking up at the ruins, or strayed
aimlessly about the streets. Not a loud word was heard. The air
seemed heavy with the suspended breath of a great city's activities:
the mournful hush of Dunkerque was even more oppressive than the
death-silence of Ypres. But when we came back to the Place Jean Bart
the unbreakable human spirit had begun to reassert itself. A handful
of children were playing in the bottom of the crater, collecting
"specimens" of glass and splintered brick; and about its rim the
market-people, quietly and as a matter of course, were setting up
their wooden stalls. In a few minutes the signs of German havoc
would be hidden behind stacks of crockery and household utensils,
and some of the pale women we had left in mournful contemplation of
the ruins would be bargaining as sharply as ever for a sauce-pan or
a butter-tub. Not once but a hundred times has the attitude of the
average French civilian near the front remin