"
And doing it.
I was taken for a tour of the house--up a broken staircase that hung
suspended, apparently from nothing, to what had been the upper story.
It was quite open to the sky and the rain was coming in. On the side
toward the German line there was no wall. There were no partitions, no
windows, only a few broken sticks of what had been furniture. And in
one corner, partly filled with rain water, a child's cradle that had
miraculously escaped destruction.
Downstairs to the left of the corridor was equal destruction. There
was one room here that, except for a great shell-hole and for a
ceiling that was sagging and almost ready to fall, was intact. Here on
a stand were surgical supplies, and there was a cot in the corner. A
soldier had just left the cot. He had come up late in the afternoon
with a nosebleed, and had now recovered.
"It has been a light day," said my guide. "Sometimes we hardly know
which way to turn--when there is much going on, you know. Probably
to-night we shall be extremely busy."
We went back into the living room and I consulted my watch. It was
half past ten o'clock. At eleven the bombardment was to begin!
The conversation in the room had turned to spies. Always, everywhere,
I found this talk of spies. It appeared that at night a handful of the
former inhabitants of the town crept back from the fields to sleep in
the cellars of what had been their homes, and some of them were under
suspicion.
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