If the papers were to be believed--always a risky business in France, and all the more so after 1940--one single bomb had leveled an area miles across.

After a terrorist bomb leveled the Federal Building in April 1995, rescue workers took over the group's concert space with only one month left in its season.

The big bomb hadn't leveled this part of Chicago, but any number of small bombs and artillery shells had had their way with it.

Stray bombs leveled a square block of the city.

In the center of town, only the rubble remains of a two-story house where 11 of Mr. Basayev's relatives died after a bomb leveled the building on June 4.

Through the centuries Tournai has been invaded, conquered, manipulated and pillaged by others, most recently by the Germans during World War II, whose bombs leveled more than 1,000 houses and almost completely destroyed the Grand' Place.

What happened on Dec. 1 when bombs leveled several villages near Tora Bora, the cave complex where Osama bin Laden was thought to be hiding?

Great guns, bombs, and mines must have leveled every building that man had raised, and then nature, unhindered, had covered the ghastly evidence of human depravity with her beauteous mantle of verdure.

Caskey could see the concussion spread through the trees and then black smoke rising as the bombs leveled two-hundred-foot areas.

Such a bomb would level Lower Manhattan.