My guides laid great stress on such crimes, but I took mental note of certain other things which were not pointed out to me. The beasts--as they always called them--had been quartered here for three weeks, but not a mirror had been cracked, not a scratch marred the highly polished black piano, and the well-stocked, exquisitely carved bookcase was precisely as it had been before the first Cossack patrol entered the city. The owner viewed his loss philosophically. "When we have placed a war indemnity upon Russia I shall be paid in full," he declared in a voice of supreme confidence. My guides never gave me an opportunity to talk alone with the few civilians in the place, and at the sausage and beer lunch the conversation was based on the "wanton destruction by the beasts of an innocent town." After they had drunk so much beer that they both fell asleep I slipped quietly away and went about amid the ruins. I came upon human bodies burned to a crisp. Heaps of empty cartridge shells littered the ground, which I examined with astonishment for they were Russian, not German, shells, and must have been used by men defending the town. I met a pretty girl of seventeen drawing water at a well, who had remained during the three weeks that the Russians were there to care for her invalid father, and had not suffered the slightest insult. Yet all my informants had told me that the Russians had spared none of the weaker sex who had remained in their path. Further investigations had revealed that the Russians had not fired a shot upon the town, but that the Germans had destroyed it driving them out. I entered a little Roman Catholic church in the undamaged section of the town and noted with interest that nothing had apparently been disturbed--this the more significant since the Russians hold a different faith. I walked back towards the river and strolled through the neat, well-shaded, churchyard to the ruins of the large church, the dominating feature of the town. It was clear from what was left that the lines of the body and the spire had been of rare beauty for such an insignificant place as Allenburg. "Too bad!" I remarked to a white-haired old man who was sitting on a bench mournfully contemplating the ruins. "Sad, so sad!" he said in a voice full of grief. "And it seems sadder that it had to be done by our own people," he added. "Were you here during the fighting?" I asked. "I was," he answered. "I would rather die than leave this place, where I was born and where I have always lived." I returned to the anxious guides add told them that I had visited the ruins of the church. "A destruction which could serve no military purpose," declared the man in brown. "You see the methods of the people Germany is fighting."