The lower part of the town, where the well-to-do classes lived, was almost unscathed.

Casual shell-fire in the two engagements with the French that preceded the taking of Dinant had smashed some cornices and shattered some windows, but nothing worse befell.

The lower half, made up mainly of the little plaster-and-stone houses of working people, was gone, extinguished, obliterated.

It lay in scorched and crumbled waste; and in it, as we rode through, I saw, excluding soldiers, just two living creatures.

Two children, both little girls, were playing at housekeeping on some stone steps under a doorway where there was no door, using bits of wreckage for furniture.