It was difficult to get about. Walls had fallen across
the way, interiors that had been homes gaped open to the streets.
Shattered beds and furnishings lay about--kitchen utensils, broken
dishes. On some of the walls holy pictures still hung, grouped about a
crucifix. There are many to tell how the crucifix has escaped in the
wholesale destruction of towns.
A shoemaker had come back into the village for the night, and had
opened his shop. For a time he seemed to be the only inhabitant of
what I had known, a short time before, as a prosperous and thriving
market town. Then through an aperture that had been a window I saw
three women sitting round a candle. And in the next street I found a
man on his knees on the pavement, working with bricks and a trowel.
He explained that he had closed up a small cellar-way. His family had
no place else to go and were coming in from the fields, where they had
sought safety, to sleep in the cellar for the night. He was leaving a
small aperture, to be closed with bags of sand, so that if the house
was destroyed over them in the night they could crawl out and escape.
He knelt on the bricks in front of the house, a patient, resigned
figure, playing no politics, interested not at all in war and
diplomacy, in a way to the sea or to a place in the sun--one of the
millions who must adapt themselves to new and fearsome situations and
do their best.
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