As a fort Des Sarts dated back to 1883.  I speak of it in the past tense, because the Germans had put it in that tense.  As a fort, or as anything resembling a fort, it had ceased to be, absolutely.  The inner works of it—­the redan and the underground barracks, and the magazines, and all—­were built after the style .followed by military engineers back in 1883, having revetments faced up with brick and stone; but only a little while ago—­in the summer of 1913, to be exact—­the job of inclosing the original works with a glacis of a newer type had been completed.  So when the Germans came along in the first week of September it was in most respects made over into a modern fort.  No doubt the re-enforcements of reserves that hurried into it to strengthen the regular garrison counted themselves lucky men to have so massive and stout a shelter from which to fight an enemy who must work in the open against them.  Poor devils, their hopes crumbled along with their walls when the Germans brought up the forty-twos.

We entered in through a breach in the first parapet and crossed, one at a time, on a tottery wooden bridge which was propped across a fosse half full of rubble, and so came to what had been the heart of the fort of Des Sarts.  Had I not already gathered some notion of the powers for destruction of those one-ton, four-foot-long shells, I should have said that the spot where we halted had been battered and crashed at for hours; that scores and perhaps hundreds of bombs had been plumped into it.  Now, though, I was prepared to believe the German captain when he said probably not more than five or six of the devil devices had struck this target.  Make it six for good measure.  Conceive each of the six as having been dammed by a hurricane and sired by an earthquake, and as being related to an active volcano on one side of the family and to a flaming meteor on the other.  Conceive it as falling upon a man-made, masonry-walled burrow in the earth and being followed in rapid succession by five of its blood brethren; then you will begin to get some fashion of mental photograph of the result.  I confess myself as unable to supply any better suggestion for a comparison.  Nor shall I attempt to describe the picture in any considerable detail.  I only know that for the first time in my life I realized the full and adequate meaning of the word chaos.  The proper definition of it was spread broadcast before my eyes.

Appreciating the impossibility of comprehending the full scope of the disaster which here had befallen, or of putting it concretely into words if I did comprehend it, I sought to pick out small individual details, which was hard to do, too, seeing that all things were jumbled together so.  This had been a series of cunningly buried tunnels and arcades, with cozy subterranean dormitories opening off of side passages, and still farther down there had been magazines and storage spaces.  Now it was all a hole in the ground, and the force which blasted it out had then pulled the hole in behind itself.  We stood on the verge, looking downward into a chasm which seemed to split its way to infinite depths, although in fact it was probably not nearly so deep as it appeared.  If we looked upward there, forty feet above our heads, was a wide riven gap in the earth crust.