In its outward appearance the room was a blend of suggestions of peace and war. There were touches of the boudoir, the bureau, and the barrack-room in the furniture. One or two dainty _bergère_ chairs, a work-stand, a pretty cabinet or two, spoke of some feminine influence that had once reigned here; the typewriters, the telephone, suggested the city office; while the barrack-room touch was provided by the Sam Browne belts, the revolvers, the riding-crops and swagger canes which were scattered about in the corners and on the tables and chairs. Life in these châteaux is not always so peaceful as their appearance would indicate. Not so very long ago I was having tea in a château with a Headquarters Staff, and the very tea-things on the table rattled with the continual air-percussion of shells screeching to and fro about the place. It was an ill-omened place, that dining-room, for all the windows on one side had been smashed, and in front of them a solid barricade of sandbags had been erected to diminish the effect of shells bursting on the gravel without. As we drank our tea placidly, half a dozen heavy shells went wailing over the house, and exploded noisily in the immediate vicinity. There are châteaux, like the château of Hooge of which I spoke in a previous chapter, which have been totally destroyed by shell-fire. Yet you may find troops living in the grounds, in dug-outs furnished from the château, or sometimes even in a single room or cellar of the château which has escaped destruction. I have been to châteaux where almost every day shells plumped square into the crumbling brickwork, ploughing their way through ancient rafters and bursting with reverberating explosions amid Buhl tables and Empire chairs and Louis XIV. clocks and old French prints. I have seen gardens still blooming amid a horrid welter of destruction, with standard roses rearing their slender stems on high, and London pride and stocks and syringa straggling over little graves dotted here and there between gaping shell-holes, and tree-trunks blasted lying across shattered cucumber-frames. I have been in a room, the last room habitable in a pretty little country-house where the flooring was of parquet, once highly polished, no doubt, but now stained with mud and scratched by hobnailed boots. A splendid Empire clock ticked away on the white marble mantelpiece; the table, spread with tin plates and cups, some bully-beef in a saucer, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of whisky, was Buhl; the chairs were of mahogany in the Empire style. A common wash-hand-stand, retrieved, I should think, from the stables, stood in a corner; in another corner an Empire couch had been spread with a flea-bag and blankets, and served as a bed for the doctor, who had his quarters there. Two walls of the apartment were curtained off with sacking, for beyond was the open air--roofless rooms, piled-up with débris, and shattered walls.