Page:Lieutenant and Others (1915) by Sapper.djvu/71

 with the rumble of falling masonry. Another house gone in the dead city. Huge holes clawed up in the pavé road, and in every corner dead and twisted horses. Children lying torn in the gutter, women and men gaping in their death agony. Here and there a soldier; legs, arms, fragments of what were once living, breathing creatures. And in nearly every house, had one gone in, little groups of civilians still moaning and muttering feebly. They had crept into their homes, frightened, terrified—to wait for the death that must come. And without cessation came the shells. In one corner a motor-ambulance stood drunkenly on three wheels; in the middle a wagon overturned with four dead horses still fast in the traces, and underneath them stuck out two legs, the legs of what had been the lead driver. A city of the dead—not a sign of visible life, save only our car picking its way carefully through dead horses and masses of bricks fallen across the road. Yesterday’s tobacco buyers stiff in the gutters; yesterday’s vendors of fish dying in some corner like rats in a trap; yesterday’s luncheon-shop a huge hole in the wall with the rafters twisted and broken,