Energy books

I saw the fires smoldering about charred beams and twisted
ironwork when I went through the city after the day of exodus.


XVII

It was a pitiful adventure to go through Amiens in the days of its
desolation, and we who had known its people so well hated its
loneliness. All abandoned towns have a tragic aspect--I often think of
Douai, which was left with all its people under compulsion of the
enemy--but Amiens was strangely sinister with heaps of ruins in its
narrow streets, and the abominable noise of high-velocity shells in
flight above its roofs, and crashing now in one direction and now in
another.
One of our sentries came out of a little house near the Place and
said:
"Keep as much as possible to the west side of the town, sir. They've
been falling pretty thick on the east side. Made no end of a mess!"
On the way back from Villers-Bretonneux and the Australian
headquarters, on the left bank of the Somme, we ate sandwiches in the
public gardens outside the Hotel du Rhin.


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