The German guns were beginning to
speak again, and unless we made haste we might not rescue the
wounded men.
"Are there many blesses here?" asked our leader.
One of the soldiers pointed to a house which had a tavern sign above
it.
"They've been taken inside," he said. "I helped to carry them." We
dodged the litter in the roadway, where, to my amazement, two old
ladies were searching in the rubbish-heaps for the relics of their
houses. They had stayed in Dixmude during this terrible
bombardment, hidden in some cellar, and now had emerged, in their
respectable black gowns, to see what damage had been done. They
seemed to be looking for something in particular--some little object
not easy to find among these heaps of calcined stones and twisted
bars of iron. One old woman shook her head sadly as though to say,
"Dear me, I can't see it anywhere." I wondered if they were looking for
some family photograph--or for some child's cinders. It might have
been one or the other, for many of these Belgian peasants had
reached a point of tragedy when death is of no more importance than
any trivial loss. The earth and sky had opened, swallowing up all their
little world in a devilish destruction. They had lost the proportions of
everyday life in the madness of things.
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