The ruin is inside. It is not the beautiful ending of destruction by fire, but the slow death by cancer which eats away, by gangrene which mounts from the cattle sheds to the stable, from the stable to the barn, and from the barn to the hearth. And at last a day comes when the front alone is standing on the ruin of the annihilated house, and then men who are passing by, seeing that it is tottering and dangerous, cut it down with blows of the axe and chop the wood into bits for their little needs. And so these houses die: houses which under their humble appearance had great souls palpitating with life, where lives were born and passed their years; where joys and griefs exclaimed and wept, where the peasant, the son of the soil, drew from this soil, the generatrix of strong races, the re-vivifying harvests which he stored away in the barn which to-day is dead. Whole villages and great villages agonize in this way through months of wearing away, and their end is no less terrible, no less majestic, no less pitiful than of those villages with glorious names which the wrath of shells beats into dust. Cantonment 77 is made up of those houses which waste away. Between the fragile walls, notched by an empty barn and a fallen shed, opens a courtyard. Filth spreads out in a vast pool on which float among the refuse a pile of garbage, boxes, the waste of cooking and greasy papers. In the corner of a recess open to every wind, on piles of bricks held together by iron bars pulled from the window sills, the cook has set his pots and bowls in line. His fire of wood so green that the sap oozes out licks the already blackened walls with its long flames. All that offers even a precarious shelter—a roof—is occupied by the men who crowd in there on old, filthy straw, and on the meager rations of fresh straw, often too fresh. And as the tiles and thatch let the rain filter through, they stretch above them strips of tent canvas. Oh, blessed canvas! To what uses is it not put! It serves as a roof against bad weather, the rain and snow; a protection against dampness, mud and vermin; planted on two stakes, stretched to a door casing, it protects the fires for cooking from draughts; in the more comfortable cantonments in the rear, where the straw is clean and abundant, where the men are at last able to take off their shoes, and their muddy leggings and their trousers heavy with dampness, it serves as the bed clothes; and, finally, at the last hour it is in the tent canvas that they collect the bodies with their torn and shattered limbs. It serves as shroud and coffin. And, faithful to its rôle, it is the last shelter.