Page:War's dark frame (IA warsdarkframe00camp).pdf/243

Rh "The war," Williams broke in, "will be getting on Kaiser Bill's nerves, don't you think?"

Something was clearly on Williams' nerves. He hurried us through and gave us only a moment to glance at the broken girders and the twisted rails in the train shed. Among the splinters of the platforms where crowds had thronged eagerly the long grass waved with a slow melancholy.

"It's not very far," he reminded us, "to the Hun trenches, and they have a nasty habit of dropping whiz-bangs in here. There's no bomb proof. Let's go."

We had scarcely reached the shelter of streets lined with looted shops when a soldier came running up and spoke to Williams. He turned with another of those confidences that made you wonder why you had ever come to see war.

"What I was afraid of. The Huns are strafing the station—dropping whiz-bangs in from the trenches."

Probably the German observers had seen us leave. It was the luck of war that they hadn't caught us going in.

We climbed a small mountain of stones and beams at the end of the street and emerged into the Petit Place, a short time ago one of the finest examples of Spanish architecture in Europe. Opposite us the Hotel de Ville raised a few sec-