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Where shells had burst after they
struck were holes in the earth five or six feet across and five or six
feet deep. Shells from the German guns and from the Belgian guns had
made a most hideous hash of a cluster of small cottages flanking a small
smelting plant which stood directly in the line of fire. Some of these
houses--workmen's homes, I suppose they had been--were of frame,
sheathed over with squares of tin put on in a diamond pattern; and you
could see places where a shell, striking such a wall a glancing blow,
had scaled it as a fish is scaled with a knife, leaving the bare wooden
ribs showing below. The next house, and the next, had been hit squarely
and plumply amidships, and they were gutted as fishes are gutted. One
house in twenty, perhaps, would be quite whole, except for broken
windows and fissures in the roof--as though the whizzing shells had
spared it deliberately.
I recall that of one house there was left standing only a breadth of
front wall between the places where windows had been.


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