Every house in sight had been hit again and again and again.  One house would have its whole front blown in, so that we could look right back to the rear walls and see the pans on the kitchen shelves.  Another house would lack a roof to it, and the tidy tiles that had made the roof were now red and yellow rubbish, piled like broken shards outside a potter’s door.  The doors stood open, and the windows, with the windowpanes all gone and in some instances the sashes as well, leered emptily, like eye-sockets without eyes.

So it went.  Two of the houses had caught fire and the interiors were quite burned away.  A sodden smell of burned things came from the still smoking ruins; but the walls, being of thick stone, stood.

Our poor tired old nag halted and sniffed and snorted.  If she had had energy enough I reckon she would have shied about and run back the way she had come, for now, just ahead, lay two dead horses—­a big gray and a roan—­with their stark legs sticking out across the road.  The gray was shot through and through in three places.  The right fore hoof of the roan had been cut smack off, as smoothly as though done with an ax; and the stiffened leg had a curiously unfinished look about it, suggesting a natural malformation.  Dead only a few hours, their carcasses already had begun to swell.  The skin on their bellies was as tight as a drumhead.

We forced the quivering mare past the two dead horses.  Beyond them the road was a litter.  Knapsacks, coats, canteens, handkerchiefs, pots, pans, household utensils, bottles, jugs and caps were everywhere.  The deep ditches on either side of the road were clogged with such things.  The dropped caps and the abandoned knapsacks were always French caps and French knapsacks, cast aside, no doubt, for a quick flight after the melee.

The Germans had charged after shelling the town, and then the French had fallen back—­or at least so we deduced from the looks of things.  In the debris was no object that bespoke German workmanship or German ownership.  This rather puzzled us until we learned that the Germans, as tidy in this game of war as in the game of life, made it a hard-and-fast rule to gather up their own belongings after every engagement, great or small, leaving behind nothing that might serve to give the enemy an idea of their losses.

We went by the church.  Its spire was gone; but, strange to say, a small flag—­the Tricolor of France—­still fluttered from a window where some one had stuck it.  We went by the taverne, or wine shop, which had a sign over its door—­a creature remotely resembling a blue lynx.  And through the door we saw half a loaf of bread and several bottles on a table.  We went by a rather pretentious house, with pear trees in front of it and a big barn alongside it; and right under the eaves of the barn I picked up the short jacket of a French trooper, so new and fresh from the workshop that the white cambric