to rock and sway.  The very pavements trembled.  Mere words are inadequate to give a conception of the horror of it all.  There would come the hungry whine of a shell passing low over the house-tops, followed, an instant later, by a shattering crash, and the whole facade of the building 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.