What remained, in historic value and in physical beauty, and even in tangible property value, was much less than what was gone forever.
I sought out the hotel near the station where we had stayed, as enforced guests of the German army, for three days in August.

Its site was a leveled gray mass, sodden, wrecked past all redemption; ruined beyond all thought of salvage.

I looked for the little inn at which we had dined.

Its front wall littered the street and its interior was a jumble of worthlessness.

I wondered again as I had wondered many times before what had become of its proprietor--the dainty, gentle little woman whose misshapen figure told us she was near the time for her baby.
I endeavored to fix the location of the little sidewalk cafe where we sat on the second or the third day of the German occupation--August twenty-first, I think, was the date--and watched the sun go out in eclipse like a copper disk.