At that, it was no completer a ruin than any of the surrounding debris.
Indeed, in the whole vista of annihilation but two objects remained
recognizably intact, and these, strange to say, were two iron bed frames
bolted to the back wall of what I think must have been a barrack room
for officers. The room itself was no longer there. Brick, mortar,
stone, concrete, steel reinforcements, iron props, the hard-packed
earth, had been ripped out and churned into indistinguishable bits, but
those two iron beds hung fast to a discolored patch of plastering,
though the floor was gone from beneath them. Seemingly they were hardly
damaged. One gathered that a 42-centimeter shell possessed in some
degree the freakishness which we associate with the behavior of
cyclones.
We were told that at the last, when the guns had been silenced and
dismounted and the walls had been pierced and the embrasures blown
bodily away, the garrison, or what was left of it, fled to these
lowermost shelters. But the burrowing bombs found the refugees out and
killed them, nearly all, and those of them who died were still buried
beneath our feet in as hideous a sepulcher as ever was digged.
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