It was nothing like dawn when we went out of the side door of the Hôtel du Rhin and strolled into the Street of the Three Pebbles. There was still the same white moonlight, intense and glittering, but with a paler sky. It shone down upon dark pools of blood and the carcasses of horses and fragments of flesh, from which a sickly smell rose. The roadway was littered with bits of timber and heaps of masonry. Many houses had collapsed into wild chaos, and others, though still standing, had been stripped of their wooden frontages and their walls were scarred by bomb-splinters. Every part of the old city, as we explored it later, had been badly mauled, and hundreds of houses were utterly destroyed. The air raid ceased at 4:30 a.m. , when the first light of dawn came into the sky.⁠ ⁠…