Those houses against which the war was waged were built—even the tenement houses—of stone or Gargantuan timbers laced together and covered with a smooth, impermeable stucco. There were, in Germany, no rural slums, no bulging, leaning, or caving barns, no tar-paper or clapboard shanties, no abandoned homesites, rotten fences, great mountains of rusting automobiles, nothing left to oxidize and blow away. Everything had been built to endure to the last generation. Maybe this was the last generation.
