Now it was a fair-sized pile of rubble, with the few intact buildings housing the 3rd Division staff. In front of a burned-out church, a water pipe stuck up from the ground, a spray of water gushing into the air. Women and children with buckets were lined up, eager to haul the fresh water home. At the base of the pipe, a gleaming white stone arm lay on the ground, its fingers gracefully pointing to the sky. Debris and masonry cascaded from the buildings into the street, making it hard to tell where the outline of homes and shops had been, but it was obvious this had been the piazza, the center of the village. Now it was crammed with shattered stone, a line of black-clad women, and American military vehicles. I found G-1, Personnel, on the ground floor of a two-story school that was missing its roof. Colonel Raymond Schleck was seated at a desk near a boarded-up window, a tin bucket catching drips of rainwater from the ceiling. Files were stacked in wooden boxes all around him, and two clerks at the other end of the room pecked at typewriters, making piles of forms in triplicate, some nearly a foot high.
