) Articles which
it did not suit them to carry off they destroyed. Wine-casks of which
they could not drink the wine, they stove in. ... And then they
retreated.
This farm-house was somebody's house, just as your home is
yours, and mine mine. To some woman or other every object in it
was familiar. She glanced at the canister on the mantelpiece and
said to herself: "I really must clean that canister to-morrow." There
the house stood, with holes in its roof, empty. And if there are half a
million similarly tragic houses in Europe to-day, as probably there
are, such frequency does not in the slightest degree diminish the
forlorn tragedy of that particular house which I have beheld.
At last Barcy came into view--the pierced remains of its church
tower over the brow of a rise in the plain. Barcy is our driver's show-
place. Barcy was in the middle of things. The fighting round Barcy
lasted a night and a day, and Barcy was taken and retaken twice.
"You see the new red roofs," said the driver as we approached. "By
those new red roofs you are in a state to judge a little what the
damage was."
Some of the newly made roofs, however, were of tarred paper.
The street by which we entered had a small-pox of shrapnel and
bullet-marks. The post office had particularly suffered: its bones
were laid bare. It had not been restored, but it was ready to do any
business that fell to be done, though closed on that afternoon.
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