She laughed. "What can one do? My mamma keeps living here, so how can I go away? Besides, one gets used to it a little."
I am bound to say I don't get used to these things, but see them always with amazement.
Lens itself is now no better than its outer suburbs, a town of battered houses without roofs and with broken walls leaning against rubbish-heaps of brickwork and timber. The enemy sent out a wireless message that the English gunners were destroying French property by bombarding the city, and then made a deep belt of destruction by blowing up long blocks of streets. After that our guns have completed the ruin, for there was a German garrison in every house, and in this kind of warfare there must be no tenderness of sentiment about bricks and mortar if the enemy is between the walls. So now in Lens the only cover for Germans and their only chance of safety is below ground in the tunnels and cellars reinforced by concrete and built by the forced labour of civilians two years and more ago when the city was menaced by a French attack. Into these tunnels the German garrisons of Lens make their way by night, and in them they live and die. Many die in them it is certain, for a tunnel is no more than a death-trap when it is blocked at the entrance by the fall of houses, or when it collapses by the bombardment of heavy shells which pierce down deep and explode with monstrous effect. That has happened, as we know, in many parts of the German line, and recently on the French front whole companies of German soldiers were buried alive in deep caves. It is happening in Lens now, if the same effect is produced by the same power of artillery. But death comes to the German soldiers there in another way, without any noise and quite invisible, and very horrible in its quietude. Many times lately the Canadians have drenched the city of Lens with gas that kills, and soaks down heavily into dug-outs and tunnels, and stifles men in their sleep before they have time to stretch out a hand for a gas-mask, or makes them die with their masks on if they fumble a second too long. The enemy, who was first to use poison-gas, should wish to God he had never betrayed his soul by such a thing, for it has come back upon him as a frightful retribution, and in Lens, in those deep, dark cellars below the ruins, German soldiers must live with terror and be afraid to sleep.