We stopped a moment to watch them.

They had small china dolls.
The river, flowing placidly along between the artificial boundaries of its stone quays, and the strange formation of cliffs, rising at the back to the height of hundreds of feet, were as they had been.

Soldiers paddled on the water in skiffs and thousands of ravens flickered about the pinnacles of the rocks, but between river and cliff there was nothing but ruination--the graveyard of the homes of three thousand people.
Yes, it was the graveyard not alone of their homes but of their prosperity and their hopes and their ambitions and their aspirations-- the graveyard of everything human beings count worth having.

This was worse than Herve or Battice or Vise, or any of the leveled towns we had seen.

Taken on the basis of comparative size, it was worse even than Louvain, as we discovered later.