Literally this town no longer existed.  It was a scrap-heap, if you like, but not a town.  Here had been a great trampling out of the grapes of wrath, and most sorrowful was the vintage that remained.

It was a hard thing to level these Belgian houses absolutely, for they were mainly built of stone or of thick brick coated over with a hard cement.  So, generally, the walls stood, even in Battice; but always the roofs were gone, and the window openings were smudged cavities, through which you looked and saw square patches of the sky if your eyes inclined upward, or else blackened masses of ruination if you gazed straight in at the interiors.  Once in a while one had been thrown flat.  Probably big guns operated here.  In such a case there was an avalanche of broken masonry cascading out into the roadway.

Midway of the mile-long avenue of utter waste which we now traversed we came on a sort of small square.  Here was the yellow village church.  It lacked a spire and a cross, and the front door was gone, so we could see the wrecked altar and the splintered pews within.  Flanking the church there had been a communal hall, which was now shapeless, irredeemable wreckage.  A public well had stood in the open space between church and hall, with a design of stone pillars about it.  The open mouth of the well we could see was choked with foul debris; but a shell had struck squarely among the pillars and they fell inward like wigwam poles, forming a crazy apex.  I remember distinctly two other things:  a picture of an elderly man with whiskers—­one of those smudged atrocities that are called in the States crayon portraits—­hanging undamaged on the naked wall of what had been an upper bedroom; and a wayside shrine of the sort so common in the Catholic countries of Europe.  A shell had hit it a glancing blow, so that the little china figure of the Blessed Virgin lay in bits behind the small barred opening of the shrine.

Of living creatures there was none.  Heretofore, in all the blasted towns I had visited, there was some human life stirring.  One could count on seeing one of the old women who are so numerous in these Belgian hamlets—­more numerous, I think, than anywhere else on earth.  In my mind I had learned to associate such a sight with at least one old woman—­an incredibly old woman, with a back bent like a measuring worm’s, and a cap on her scanty hair, and a face crosshatched with a million wrinkles—­who would be pottering about at the back of some half-ruined house or maybe squatting in a desolated doorway staring at us with her rheumy, puckered eyes.  Or else there would be a hunchback—­ crooked spines being almost as common in parts of Belgium as goiters are in parts of Switzerland.  But Battice had become an empty tomb, and was as lonely and as silent as a tomb.  Its people—­those who survived—­had fled from it as from an abomination.