In the center of the town the main street opens out to form an irregular circle, and the houses fronting it make a compact ring.  Through a gap one gets a glimpse of the little river which one has just crossed; and on the river bank stands the mill, or what is left of it, and that is little enough.  Its roof is gone, shot clear away in a shower of shattered tiling, and its walls are breached in a hundred places.  It is pretty certain that mill will never grind grist again.

On its upper floor, which is now a sieve, the Germans—­so they themselves told us—­found, after the fighting, the seventy-year-old miller, dead, with a gun in his hands and a hole in his head.  He had elected to help the French defend the place; and it was as well for him that he fell fighting, because, had he been taken alive, the Prussians, following their grim rule for all civilians caught with weapons, would have stood him up against a wall with a firing squad before him.

The houses round about have fared better, in the main, than the mill, though none of them has come scatheless out of the fight.  Hardly a windowpane is whole; hardly a wall but is pocked by bullets or rent by larger missiles.  Some houses have lost roofs; some have lost side walls, so that one can gaze straight into them and see the cluttered furnishings, half buried in shattered masonry and crumbled plaster.

One small cottage has been blown clear away in a blast of artillery fire; only the chimney remains, pointing upward like a stubby finger.  A fireplace, with a fire in it, is the glowing heart of a house; and a chimney completes it and reveals that it is a home fit for human creatures to live in; but we see here—­and the truth of it strikes us as it never did before—­that a chimney standing alone typifies desolation and ruin more fitly, more brutally, than any written words could typify it.

Everywhere there are soldiers—­German soldiers—­in their soiled, dusty gray service uniforms, always in heavy boots; always with their tunics buttoned to the throat.  Some, off duty, are lounging at ease in the doors of the houses.  More, on duty, are moving about briskly in squads, with fixed bayonets.  One is learning to ride a bicycle, and when he falls off, as he does repeatedly, his comrades laugh at him and shout derisive advice at him.

There are not many of the townsfolk in sight.  Experience has taught us that in any town not occupied by the enemy our appearance will be the signal for an immediate gathering of the citizens, all flocking about us, filled with a naive, respectful inquisitiveness, and wanting to know where we have come from and to what place we are going.  Here in this stricken town not a single villager comes near us.  A priest passes us, bows deeply to us, and in an instant is gone round a jog in the street, the skirts of his black robe flicking behind him.  From upper windows faces peer out at us—­faces of women and