Oh Albert, what a place of death thou art now, with thy returned children playing hide and seek around the heaps of thy homes. How is it possible to _return_ to this place. It is not a return: no one can ever return to the Albert of 1914. These that we see are revenants come to look at spectral homes. For Albert is dead. There you can realise that a human home is a living being like the woman who made it. It can prosper or decay. It can go shabby and suffer. It can be wounded or maimed--it can be killed. We mercifully hide our dead in Earth's great bosom--but we leave our dead homes long when they lie, in all their horror and terror. There stands a shrunken little house where the tiles have been swept away, the plaster also, and the bare laths of the ceiling are all exposed, but they look like a cap bashed down on the head of a dead man. Yonder lies a recumbent habitation with a welter of grey laths and beams on its burst-out side, like the sun-dried ribs of a dead dromedary. Beyond it stands a wall that is left, and then an outraged home with madness fixed in its visage in the moment of death-agony. Here is a house with gutted entrails half congealed and terrible to behold. There is a house that died simply of shock. But its neighbour _vis-à-vis_ was hit by some striding giant with iron fist. Rows of houses are seen cowering, as if they had had their hands up trying to ward off the dreadful fate which stalked above them. Houses lie killed as it were in the action of flight, veritably in the act of treading on one another's heels in a frenzy to get away. There are houses which are abased, houses which have fallen foremost on their faces, houses which have fallen backwards, bottom over top into confusion and debris behind, houses with their sides torn off as men's sides were torn off in the war, exposing for one instant beating hearts. There are houses where simply the life-breath has gone out--dead, blind, empty and desolate. One can hardly think of the existence once of rooms, the marriage-bedrooms of sweet human honeymoons, the room where the baby slept a baby's untroubled sleep, the children's room where one thinks of a child's cry in the night or a child's lisped prayer before its mother or the crucifix, the room where the home met, the table round which went food and talk and laughter in a common innocence and ignorance of destiny--all gone now in shapeless ruin. All the houses were the children of Notre Dame--the leaning Virgin who hung out from the stricken tower of the mighty masonry of the Cathedral-church, and yearned o'er the city. The miracle of her suspense in air over Albert was a never-ceasing wonder, and the soldiers said the city would never be taken as long as she remained un-shot down from the eminence of the great church.