It is amusing to see German prisoners at work repairing the damage they have done, rebuilding roads and bridges and canals. They make excellent workmen and seem content with their lot. A gray-clad figure, wearing the round fatigue cap with the red band around it, was mending a roof as we passed. He may well have set the bomb that was meant to level the house to the ground; but all the same he never turned his round face towards us, or missed a stroke of his hammer in his apparent effort to make it bomb-proof in the future. The city of Roye presents a new phase of destruction. Outwardly it looks normal enough, with the exception of the fine church and a few important buildings which are in ruins. But it is all a brick shell of what was once a city. The Germans have played a grisly joke on the inhabitants, who, when they return to their houses, discover the same old outside but the inside gone. Each house has been systematically denuded of everything--furniture, decorations, glass, metals, tools, etc., and then the interior blown up. In the shops all the goods were emptied from the shelves on to the floor and then the roof exploded. Not a pane of glass, not a lighting fixture, not a lock or key, remains. The cost to the Germans in time and money alone must have been enormous. I wandered around by myself exploring further these streets of hollow mockery. A woman was standing in the doorway of a shop, gazing curiously to see an untamed American behaving as if at home. We exchanged "Bon jours," and I begged permission to step into her shop while I changed a film in my kodak. The place was bare, save for a few bicycle tires and tools piled on the counter, and these the woman told me she and her husband had buried when they were driven out nearly three years ago. The husband had been mobilized, and she, fortunately, had been able to go to relatives in the Midi. "Goo!" came to me from the dark recesses of a perambulator, and there was a bouncing baby, born since the war. The woman came back six weeks ago, having heard that her shop was safe. She did not seem to be disheartened by the mutilation of her property and the loss of her stock, and has already tried to start in business again by selling odds and ends to the soldiers and few civilians who have returned like herself. "Mais que voulez-vous? Business doesn't go very well these days." I smiled. Competition may be the life of trade, but customers are pretty handy to keep it going. I wished her au revoir, and told her I'd come back some day when her shop is rebuilt and she is doing more flourishing business than ever before.