There was a dense fog.  At 6 A.M. fog usually covers the valleys of the Meurthe and Moselle.  From the station I could see only a building across the road.  A gendarme demanded my credentials.  I handed him the laisser-passer from the Quartier General of the “First French Army,” which controls all coming and going, all activity in that region.  The gendarme demanded to know the hour when I proposed to leave.  I told him.  He said it would be necessary to have the permit “vised for departure” at the headquarters of the gendarmerie.  He pointed to the hazy outlines of another building just distinguishable through the fog.

This was proof that the town contained buildings—­not just a building.  The place was not entirely destroyed, as I had supposed.  I went down the main street from the station, the fog enveloping me.  I had letters to the town officials, but it was too early in the morning to present them.  I would first get my own impressions of the wreck and the ruin.  But I could see nothing on either hand as I stumbled along in the mud.  So I commented to myself that this was not as bad as some places I had seen.  I thought of the substantial station and the buildings across the road—­untouched by war.  I compared Gerbeviller with places where there is not even a station—­where not one simple house remains as the result of “the day when the Germans came.”

The road was winding and steep, dipping down to the swift little stream that twists a turbulent passage through the town.  The day was coming fast but the fog remained white and impenetrable.  After a few minutes I began to see dark shapes on either side of the road.  Tall, thin, irregular shapes, some high, some low, but with outlines all softened, toned down by the banks of white vapor.

I started across the road to investigate and fell into a pile of jagged masonry on the sidewalk.  Through the nearness of the fog I could see tumbled piles of bricks.  The shapes still remained—­spectres that seemed to move in the light wind from the valley.  An odor that was not of the freshness of the morning assailed me.  I climbed across the walk.  No wall of buildings barred my path, but I mounted higher on the piles of brick and stones.  A heavy black shape was now at my left hand.  I looked up and in the shadow there was no fog.  I could see a crumbled swaying side wall of a house that was.  The odor I noticed was that caused by fire.  Sticking from the wall I could see the charred wood joists that once supported the floor of the second story.  Higher, the lifting fog permitted me to see the waving boughs of a tree that hung over the house that was, outlined against a clear sky.  At my feet, sticking out of the pile of bricks and stones, was the twisted iron fragments that was once the frame of a child’s bed.  I climbed out into the sunshine.

I was standing in the midst of a desolation and a silence that was profound.  There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls.  Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes.  They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were.  They were all that remained of nine-tenths of Gerbeviller.