Some of these houses--workmen's homes, I suppose they had been--were of frame, sheathed over with squares of tin put on in a diamond pattern; and you could see places where a shell, striking such a wall a glancing blow, had scaled it as a fish is scaled with a knife, leaving the bare wooden ribs showing below.

The next house, and the next, had been hit squarely and plumply amidships, and they were gutted as fishes are gutted.

One house in twenty, perhaps, would be quite whole, except for broken windows and fissures in the roof--as though the whizzing shells had spared it deliberately.
I recall that of one house there was left standing only a breadth of front wall between the places where windows had been.

It rose in a ragged column to the line of the roof-rafters--only, of course, there was neither roof nor rafter now.

On the face of the column, as though done in a spirit of bitter irony, was posted a proclamation, signed by the burgomaster and the military commandant, calling on the vanished dwellers of this place to preserve their tranquillity.
On the side of the fort away from the city, and in the direction whence we had come, a corporal's guard had established itself in a rent-asunder house in order to be out of the wet.