The concussion of a big gunfire had shivered every window in this quarter of town.

There being no sufficient stock of glass with which to replace the broken panes, and no way of bringing in fresh supplies, the owners of the damaged buildings had patched the holes with bits of planking filched from more complete ruins near by.
Of course there were other reasons, too, if one stopped to sum them up: Few would have the money to buy fresh glass, even if there was any fresh glass to buy, and the local glaziers--such of them as survived--would be serving the colors.

All France had gone to war and at this time of writing had not come back, except in dribbling streams of wounded and prisoners.
These ragged boards, sparingly nailed across the window sockets, gave the houses the air of wearing masks and of squinting at us through narrow eye slits.

The railroad station was windowless, too, like all the buildings round about, but nobody had closed the openings here, and it gaped emptily in fifty places, and the raw, gusty winds of a North European fall searched through it.
In this immediate neighborhood few of the citizens were to be seen.
Even those houses which still were humanly habitable appeared to be untenanted; only soldiers were about, and not so very many of them.

A hundred yards up the tracks, on a siding, a squad of men with a derrick and crane were hoisting captured French field guns upon flat cars to be taken to Berlin and exhibited as spoils of conquest for the benefit of the stay-at-homes.