his fellow townsmen were “up there”—­by that meaning the trenches on the hills back of the town.  A German officer, newly arrived on the spot and apparently sincere in his efforts to alleviate the misery of the survivors, told us that, judging by what data he had been able to gather, between four and six hundred men and youths of Dinant had fallen in the house-to-house conflicts between Germans and civilians, or in the wholesale executions which followed the subjugation of the place and the capture of such ununiformed belligerents as were left.

In this instance subjugation meant annihilation.  The lower part of the town, where the well-to-do classes lived, was almost unscathed.  Casual shell-fire in the two engagements with the French that preceded the taking of Dinant had smashed some cornices and shattered some windows, but nothing worse befell.  The lower half, made up mainly of the little plaster-and-stone houses of working people, was gone, extinguished, obliterated.  It lay in scorched and crumbled waste; and in it, as we rode through, I saw, excluding soldiers, just two living creatures.  Two children, both little girls, were playing at housekeeping on some stone steps under a doorway where there was no door, using bits of wreckage for furniture.  We stopped a moment to watch them.  They had small china dolls.

The river, flowing placidly along between the artificial boundaries of its stone quays, and the strange formation of cliffs, rising at the back to the height of hundreds of feet, were as they had been.  Soldiers paddled on the water in skiffs and thousands of ravens flickered about the pinnacles of the rocks, but between river and cliff there was nothing but ruination—­the graveyard of the homes of three thousand people.

Yes, it was the graveyard not alone of their homes but of their prosperity and their hopes and their ambitions and their aspirations—­ the graveyard of everything human beings count worth having.  This was worse than Herve or Battice or Vise, or any of the leveled towns we had seen.  Taken on the basis of comparative size, it was worse even than Louvain, as we discovered later.  It was worse than anything I ever saw —­worse than anything I ever shall see, I think.

These hollow shells about us were like the picked cadavers of houses.  Ends of burnt and broken rafters stood up like ribs.  Empty window openings stared at us like the eye sockets in skulls.  It was not a town upon which we looked, but the dead and rotting bones of a town.

Just over the ragged line that marked the lowermost limits of the destructive fury of the conquerors, and inside the section which remained intact, we traversed a narrow street called—­most appropriately, I thought—­the Street of Paul the Penitent, and passed a little house on the shutters of which was written, in chalked German script, these words:  “A Grossmutter”—­grandmother—­“ninety-six years old lives here.  Don’t disturb her.”  Other houses along here bore the familiar line, written by German soldiers who had been billeted in them:  “Good people.  Leave them alone!”