Near me I discerned a litter of metal fragments.  From such of the scraps as retained any shape at all, I figured that they had been part of the protective casing of a gun mounted somewhere above.  The missile which wrecked the gun flung its armor down here.  I searched my brain for a simile which might serve to give a notion of the present state of that steel jacket.  I didn’t find the one I wanted, but if you will think of an earthenware pot which has been thrown from a very high building upon a brick sidewalk you may have some idea of what I saw.

At that, it was no completer a ruin than any of the surrounding debris.  Indeed, in the whole vista of annihilation but two objects remained recognizably intact, and these, strange to say, were two iron bed frames bolted to the back wall of what I think must have been a barrack room for officers.  The room itself was no longer there.  Brick, mortar, stone, concrete, steel reinforcements, iron props, the hard-packed earth, had been ripped out and churned into indistinguishable bits, but those two iron beds hung fast to a discolored patch of plastering, though the floor was gone from beneath them.  Seemingly they were hardly damaged.  One gathered that a 42-centimeter shell possessed in some degree the freakishness which we associate with the behavior of cyclones.

We were told that at the last, when the guns had been silenced and dismounted and the walls had been pierced and the embrasures blown bodily away, the garrison, or what was left of it, fled to these lowermost shelters.  But the burrowing bombs found the refugees out and killed them, nearly all, and those of them who died were still buried beneath our feet in as hideous a sepulcher as ever was digged.  There was no getting them out from that tomb.  The Crack of Doom will find them still there, I guess.

To reach a portion of Des Sarts, as yet un-visited, we skirted the gape of the crater, climbing over craggy accumulations of wreckage, and traversed a tunnel with an arched roof and mildewed brick walls, like a wine vault.  The floor of it was littered with the knapsacks and water bottles of dead or captured men, with useless rifles broken at the stocks and bent in the barrels, and with suchlike riffle.  At the far end of the passage we came out into the open at the back side of the fort.

“Right here,” said the officer who was piloting us, “I witnessed a sight which made a deeper impression upon me than anything I have seen in this campaign.  After the white flag had been hoisted by the survivors and we had marched in, I halted my men just here at the entrance to this arcade.  We didn’t dare venture into the redan, for sporadic explosions were still occurring in the ammunition stores.  Also there were fires raging.  Smoke was pouring thickly out of the mouth of the tunnel.  It didn’t seem possible that there could be anyone alive back yonder.