Approaching Des Sarts more nearly we came to a longish stretch of highway, which the French had cleared of visual obstructions in anticipation of resistance by infantry in the event that the outer ring of defenses gave way before the German bombardment.  It had all been labor in vain, for the town capitulated after the outposts fell; but it must have been very great labor.  Any number of fine elm trees had been felled and their boughs, stripped now of leaves, stuck up like bare bones.  There were holes in the metaled road where misaimed shells had descended, and in any one of these holes you might have buried a horse.  A little gray church stood off by itself upon the plain.  It had been homely enough to start with.  Now with its steeple shorn away and one of its two belfry windows obliterated by a straying shot it had a rakish, cock-eyed look to it.

Just beyond where the church was our chauffeur halted the car in obedience to an order from the staff officer who had been detailed by Major von Abercron, commandant of Maubeuge, to accompany us on this particular excursion.  Our guide pointed off to the right.  “There,” he said, “is where we dropped the first of our big ones when we were trying to get the range of the fort.  You see our guns were posted at a point between eight and nine kilometers away and at the start we overshot a trifle.  Still to the garrison yonder it must have been an unhappy foretaste of what they might shortly expect, when they saw the forty-twos striking here in this field and saw what execution they did among the cabbage and the beet patches.”

We left the car and, following our guide, went to look.  Spaced very neatly at intervals apart of perhaps a hundred and fifty yards a series of craters broke the surface of the earth.  Considering the tools which dug them they were rather symmetrical craters, not jagged and gouged, but with smooth walls and each in shape a perfect funnel.  We measured roughly a typical specimen.  Across the top it was between fifty and sixty feet in diameter, and it sloped down evenly for a depth of eighteen feet in the chalky soil to a pointed bottom, where two men would have difficulty standing together without treading upon each other’s toes.  Its sides were lined with loose pellets of earth of the average size of a tennis ball, and when we slid down into the hole these rounded clods accompanied us in small avalanches.

We were filled with astonishment, first, that an explosive grenade, weighing upward of a ton, could be so constructed that it would penetrate thus far into firm and solid earth before it exploded; and, second, that it could make such a neat saucer of a hole when it did explode.  But there was a still more amazing thing to be pondered.  Of the earth which had been dispossessed from the crevasse, amounting to a great many wagonloads, no sign remained.  It was not heaped up about the lips of the funnel; it was not visibly scattered over