Page:Women Wanted.djvu/58

 growing in the pavement there between the streetcar tracks. The Hotel de Ville is only a shell of a building with the outer walls standing. This shop is shuttered tight. The next has the entire front gone, blown away in a bombardment. There are empty houses from which the occupants have months ago fled. Here stands the skeleton of a pretentious residence, the roof gone and the front riddled: we look directly in on the second-story room with a dresser and a bed in disarray. There a curtain from a deserted little front parlour flaps dismally through a shattered window-pane almost in our faces. Here above the cellar-grating of a house in ruins, there arises a sickening odour. We look at each other in questioning horror; perhaps the military with the pick and spade assigned to disinterment duty after some bombardment did not dig deep enough here. But the captain does not wish to understand and hurries us along to the next street.

In the ghastly stillness of this city that was once Rheims, at last there is a sound of life. Down the Rue de la Paix, the street of peace, an army supply-wagon clatters past us. And you have no idea how pleasant can be the sound even of noise.

Then across the way appears a miIk-woman, pushing her cart with four tin cans and jingling a little bell. There are a few people, it seems, still left, employés in the champagne industry, who cling to their homes even though they must live in the cellar.