Through a gap one gets a glimpse of the little river which one has just crossed; and on the river bank stands the mill, or what is left of it, and that is little enough.

Its roof is gone, shot clear away in a shower of shattered tiling, and its walls are breached in a hundred places.

It is pretty certain that mill will never grind grist again.
On its upper floor, which is now a sieve, the Germans--so they themselves told us--found, after the fighting, the seventy-year-old miller, dead, with a gun in his hands and a hole in his head.

He had elected to help the French defend the place; and it was as well for him that he fell fighting, because, had he been taken alive, the Prussians, following their grim rule for all civilians caught with weapons, would have stood him up against a wall with a firing squad before him.
The houses round about have fared better, in the main, than the mill, though none of them has come scatheless out of the fight.

Hardly a windowpane is whole; hardly a wall but is pocked by bullets or rent by larger missiles.