So crushed were they that if removed, a tap
with a hammer would make them fall into thousands of splinters.
The houses round about the church had been completely razed to the
ground. Those adjacent were partly unroofed, with perhaps a wall blown
out showing an upstairs with a stairway swinging from the floor, beams
from the roof fallen over the iron bedstead, sheets of wall paper
dangling from the walls, and every other imaginable combination of
wreckage. And yet a few doors away down the street where the houses
had not been very badly damaged they were occupied by civilians who
tried to eke out an existence by selling candy and foodstuffs.
It is a never-failing source of wonder to see people in such places
which were being shelled daily, hanging on desperately to the old
homes, not knowing when a shell might come through the roof and kill
them all. That was brought home to me later on when, as I passed
through a village one afternoon, I saw three women being dug out of
the cellar of a house in which a shell had exploded a minute before.
On another occasion in a village close by a mother with her babe at
her breast, three children of various ages, the husband and the
grandmother, were all killed in one room by a German shell, the walls,
ceiling and floor being splattered with blood and brains. And so it
goes on day after day among the civilians in the shelled area in
France.
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