I started across the road to investigate and fell into a pile of jagged masonry on the sidewalk. Through the nearness of the fog I could see tumbled piles of bricks. The shapes still remained--spectres that seemed to move in the light wind from the valley. An odor that was not of the freshness of the morning assailed me. I climbed across the walk. No wall of buildings barred my path, but I mounted higher on the piles of brick and stones. A heavy black shape was now at my left hand. I looked up and in the shadow there was no fog. I could see a crumbled swaying side wall of a house that was. The odor I noticed was that caused by fire. Sticking from the wall I could see the charred wood joists that once supported the floor of the second story. Higher, the lifting fog permitted me to see the waving boughs of a tree that hung over the house that was, outlined against a clear sky. At my feet, sticking out of the pile of bricks and stones, was the twisted iron fragments that was once the frame of a child's bed. I climbed out into the sunshine. I was standing in the midst of a desolation and a silence that was profound. There was nothing there that lived, except a few fire-blacked trees that stuck up here and there in the shelter of broken walls. Now I understood the meaning of the spectral shapes. They were nothing but the broken walls of the other houses that were. They were all that remained of nine-tenths of Gerbéviller. I wandered along to where the street turned abruptly. There the ground pitched more sharply to the little river. There stood an entire half of a house unscathed by fire; it was one of those unexplainable freaks that often occur in great catastrophes. Even the window glass was intact. Smoke was coming from the chimney. I went to the opposite side and there stood an old woman looking out toward the river, brooding over the ruin stretching below her. "You are lucky," I said. "You still have your home." She threw out her hands and turned a toothless countenance toward me. I judged her to be well over seventy. It wasn't her home, she explained. Her home was "là-bas"--pointing vaguely in the distance. She had lived there fifty years--now it was burned. Her son's house for which he had saved thirty years to be able to call it his own, was also gone; but then her son was dead, so what did it matter? Yes, he was shot on the day the Germans came. He was ill, but they killed him. Oh, yes, she saw him killed. When the Germans went away she came to this house and built a fire in the stove. It was very cold. And why were the houses burned? No; it was not the result of bombardment. Gerbéviller was not bombarded until after the houses were burned. They were burned by the Germans systematically. They went from house to house with their torches and oil and pitch. They did not explain why they burned the houses, but it was because they were angry.