The stillness was as terrible as the spread of the quick busy
weeds between the paving-stones; the air smelt of pounded
mortar and crushed stone; the sound of a footfall echoed like
the drop of a pebble in a well. At first the horror of
wrecked apartment-houses and big shops laid open makes one
waste energy in anger. It is not seemly that rooms should be
torn out of the sides of buildings as one tears the soft heart
out of English bread; that villa roofs should lie across iron
gates of private garages, or that drawing-room doors should
flap alone and disconnected between two emptinesses of twisted
girders. The eye wearies of the repeated pattern that burst
shells make on stone walls, as the mouth sickens of the taste
of mortar and charred timber. One quarter of the place had
been shelled nearly level; the facades of the houses stood
doorless, roofless, and windowless like stage scenery. This
was near the cathedral, which is always a favourite mark for
the heathen. They had gashed and ripped the sides of the
cathedral itself, so that the birds flew in and out at will;
they had smashed holes in the roof; knocked huge cantles out
of the buttresses, and pitted and starred the paved square
outside. They were at work, too, that very afternoon, though
I do not think the cathedral was their objective for the
moment. We walked to and fro in the silence of the streets
and beneath the whirring wings overhead. Presently, a young
woman, keeping to the wall, crossed a corner. An old woman
opened a shutter (how it jarred!), and spoke to her. The
silence closed again, but it seemed to me that I heard a sound
of singing--the sort of chant one hears in nightmare-cities of
voices crying from underground.