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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13820 ***
+UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS
+
+
+by Lord Dunsany
+
+
+1919
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+
+I have chosen a title that shall show that I make no claim for this
+book to be “up-to-date.” As the first title indicates, I hoped to
+show, to as many as might to read my words, something of the extent
+of the wrongs that the people of France had suffered. There is no
+such need any longer. The tales, so far as they went, I gather
+together here for the few that seem to read my books in England.
+
+                                                            Dunsany.
+
+
+
+
+A Dirge Of Victory (Sonnet)
+
+
+Lift not thy trumpet, Victory, to the sky,
+  Nor through battalions nor by batteries blow,
+  But over hollows full of old wire go,
+Where among dregs of war the long-dead lie
+With wasted iron that the guns passed by.
+  When they went eastwards like a tide at flow;
+  There blow thy trumpet that the dead may know,
+Who waited for thy coming, Victory.
+
+It is not we that have deserved thy wreath,
+  They waited there among the towering weeds.
+The deep mud burned under the thermite’s breath,
+  And winter cracked the bones that no man heeds:
+Hundreds of nights flamed by: the seasons passed.
+And thou last come to them at last, at last!
+
+
+
+
+The Cathedral Of Arras
+
+
+On the great steps of Arras Cathedral I saw a procession, in silence,
+standing still.
+
+They were in orderly and perfect lines, stirring or swaying slightly:
+sometimes they bent their heads, sometimes two leaned together, but
+for the most part they were motionless. It was the time when the
+fashion is just changing and some were newly all in shining yellow,
+while others still wore green.
+
+I went up the steps amongst them, the only human thing, for men and
+women worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have come
+instead; little humble things, all less than four years old, in great
+numbers thronging the steps processionally, and growing in perfect
+rows just where step meets step. They have come to Arras with the
+wind and the rain; which enter the aisles together whenever they
+will, and go wherever man went; they have such a reverent air, the
+young limes on the three flights of steps, that you would say they
+did not know that Arras Cathedral was fallen on evil days, that they
+did not know they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but thought that
+these great walls open to stars and sun were the natural and fitting
+place for the worship of little weeds.
+
+Behind them the shattered houses of Arras seemed to cluster about the
+cathedral as, one might fancy easily, hurt and frightened children,
+so wistful are their gaping windows and old, grey empty gables, so
+melancholy and puzzled. They are more like a little old people come
+upon trouble, gazing at their great elder companion and not knowing
+what to do.
+
+But the facts of Arras are sadder than a poet’s most tragic fancies.
+In the western front of Arras Cathedral stand eight pillars rising
+from the ground; above them stood four more. Of the four upper
+pillars the two on the left are gone, swept away by shells from the
+north: and a shell has passed through the neck of one of the two that
+is left, just as a bullet might go through a daffodil’s stem.
+
+The left-hand corner of that western wall has been caught from the
+north, by some tremendous shell which has torn the whole corner down
+in a mound of stone: and still the walls have stood.
+
+I went in through the western doorway. All along the nave lay a long
+heap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a little
+trodden path over the grass and weeds. This is all that remained of
+the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may have
+been in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them. It was
+all down but one slender arch that crossed the nave just at the
+transept; it stood out against the sky, and all who saw it wondered
+how it stood.
+
+In the southern aisle panes of green glass, in twisted frame of lead,
+here and there lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple-tree-after a
+hailstorm in spring. The aisles still had their roofs over them which
+those stout old walls held up in spite of all.
+
+Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous. Perhaps
+there was more to bring down there, so the Germans brought it down:
+there may have been a tower there, for all I know, or a spire.
+
+I stood on the heap and looked towards the altar. To my left all was
+ruin. To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.
+The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened,
+partly broken. A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was
+this that had opened the door.
+
+Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something
+made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.
+
+As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate
+sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a
+sad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemed
+to be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been the
+cathedral; perhaps she had once been the Bishop’s servant, or the
+wife of one of the vergers; she only remained of all who had been
+there in other days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws. I spoke to
+her. All Arras, she said, was ruined. The great cathedral was ruined,
+her own family were ruined utterly, and she pointed to where the sad
+houses gazed from forlorn dead windows. Absolute ruin, she said; but
+there must be no armistice. No armistice. No. It was necessary that
+there should be no armistice at all. No armistice with Germans.
+
+She passed on, resolute and sad, and the guns boomed on beyond Arras.
+
+A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes’ heads on his collar, showed
+me a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was five
+years ago. It was the very chancel before which I was standing. To
+see that photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera that
+took it must have stood where I was standing, only a little lower
+down, under the great heap. Though one knew there had been an altar
+there, and candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of a
+cathedral’s interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on that
+weedy heap, in the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast with
+which the mind fumbled.
+
+I walked a little with the French interpreter. We came to a little
+shrine in the southern aisle. It had been all paved with marble, and
+the marble was broken into hundreds of pieces, and someone had
+carefully picked up all the bits, and laid them together on the
+altar.
+
+And this pathetic heap that was gathered of broken bits had drawn
+many to stop and gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they had
+written their names on them: every bit had a name on it, with but a
+touch of irony the Frenchman said, “All that is necessary to bring
+your name to posterity is to write it on one of these stones.”, “No,”
+I said, “I will do it by describing all this.” And we both laughed.
+
+I have not done it yet: there is more to say of Arras. As I begin the
+tale of ruin and wrong, the man who did it totters. His gaudy power
+begins to stream away like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne will
+be bare, and I shall have but begun to say what I have to say of
+calamity in cathedral and little gardens of Arras.
+
+The winter of the Hohenzollerns will come; sceptre, uniforms, stars
+and courtiers all gone; still the world will not know half of the
+bitter wrongs of Arras. And spring will bring a new time and cover
+the trenches with green, and the pigeons will preen themselves on the
+shattered towers, and the lime-trees along the steps will grow taller
+and brighter, and happier men will sing in the streets untroubled by
+any War Lord; by then, perhaps, I may have told, to such as care to
+read, what such a war did in an ancient town, already romantic when
+romance was young, when war came suddenly without mercy, without
+pity, out of the north and east, on little houses, carved galleries,
+and gardens; churches, cathedrals and the jackdaws’ nests.
+
+
+
+
+A Good War
+
+
+Nietsche said, “You have heard that a good cause justifies any war,
+but I say unto you that a good war justifies any cause.”
+
+A man was walking alone over a plain so desolate that, if you have
+never seen it, the mere word desolation could never convey to you the
+melancholy surroundings that mourned about this man on his lonely
+walk. Far off a vista of trees followed a cheerless road all dead as
+mourners suddenly stricken dead in some funereal procession. By this
+road he had come; but when he had reached a certain point he turned
+from the road at once, branching away to the left, led by a line of
+bushes that may once have been a lane. For some while his feet had
+rustled through long neglected grass; sometimes he lifted them up to
+step over a telephone wire that lolled over old entanglements and
+bushes; often he came to rusty strands of barbed wire and walked
+through them where they had been cut, perhaps years ago, by huge
+shells; then his feet hissed on through the grass again, dead grass
+that had hissed about his boots all through the afternoon.
+
+Once he sat down to rest on the edge of a crater, weary with such
+walking as he had never seen before; and after he had stayed there a
+little while a cat that seemed to have its home in that wild place
+started suddenly up and leaped away over the weeds. It seemed an
+animal totally wild, and utterly afraid of man.
+
+Grey bare hills surrounded the waste: a partridge called far off:
+evening was drawing in. He rose wearily, and yet with a certain
+fervour, as one that pursues With devotion a lamentable quest.
+Looking round him as he left his resting-place he saw a cabbage or
+two that after some while had come back to what was a field and had
+sprouted on the edge of a shell-hole. A yellowing convolvulus climbed
+up a dead weed. Weeds, grass and tumbled earth were all about him. It
+would be no better when he went on. Still he went on. A flower or two
+peeped up among the weeds. He stood up and looked at the landscape
+and drew no hope from that, the shattered trunk of a stricken tree
+leered near him, white trenches scarred the hillside. He followed an
+old trench through a hedge of elder, passed under more wire, by a
+great rusty shell that had not burst, passed by a dug-out where
+something grey seemed to lie down at the bottom of many steps. Black
+fungi grew near the entrance. He went on and on over shell-holes,
+passing round them where they were deep, stepping into or over the
+small ones. Little burrs clutched at him; he went rustling on, the
+only sound in the waste but the clicking of shattered iron. Now he
+was among nettles. He came by many small unnatural valleys. He passed
+more trenches only guarded by fungi. While it was light he followed
+little paths, marvelling who made them. Once he got into a trench.
+Dandelions leaned across it as though to bar his way, believing man
+to have gone and to have no right to return. Weeds thronged, in
+thousands here. It was the day of the weeds. It was only they that
+seemed to triumph in those fields deserted of man. He passed on down
+the trench and never knew whose trench it once had been. Frightful
+shells had smashed it here and there, and had twisted iron as though
+round gigantic fingers that had twiddled it idly a moment and let it
+drop to lie in the rain for ever. He passed more dug-outs and black
+fungi, watching them; and then he left the trench, going straight on
+over the open: again dead grasses hissed about his feet, sometimes
+small wire sang faintly He passed through a belt of nettles and
+thence to dead grass again. And now the light of the afternoon was
+beginning to dwindle away. He had intended to reach his journey’s end
+by daylight, for he was past the time of life when one wanders after
+dark, but he had not contemplated the difficulty of walking over that
+road, or dreamed that lanes he knew could be so foundered and merged,
+in that mournful desolate moor.
+
+Evening was filling fast, still he kept on. It was the time when the
+cornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turn
+grey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit their
+innumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation:
+and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound of
+iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound that
+would haunt the waste for ever.
+
+And evening settled down, a huge grey canvas waiting for sombre
+pictures; a setting for all the dark tales of the world, haunted
+forever a grizzly place was haunted ever, in any century, in any
+land; but not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and
+half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things
+huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions,
+under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was
+villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two
+Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering for
+dominion of the world.
+
+The cold wind blew over the blasted heath and bits of broken iron
+flapped on and on.
+
+And now the traveller hurried, for night was falling, and such a
+night as three witches might have brewed in a cauldron. He went on
+eagerly but with infinite sadness. Over the sky-line strange rockets
+went up from the war, peered oddly over the earth and went down
+again. Very far off a few soldiers lit a little fire of their own.
+The night grew colder; tap, tap, went broken iron.
+
+And at last the traveller stopped in the lonely night and looked
+round him attentively, and appeared to be satisfied that he had come
+within sight of his journey’s end, although to ordinary eyes the spot
+to which he had come differed in no way from the rest of the waste.
+
+He went no further, but turned round and round, peering piece by
+piece at that weedy and cratered earth.
+
+He was looking for the village where he was born.
+
+
+
+
+The House With Two Storeys
+
+
+I came again to Croisilles.
+
+I looked for the sunken road that we used to hold in support, with
+its row of little shelters in the bank and the carved oak saints
+above them here and there that had survived the church in Croisilles.
+I could have found it with my eyes shut. With my eyes open I could
+not find it. I did not recognize the lonely metalled road down which
+lorries were rushing for the little lane so full of life, whose
+wheel-ruts were three years old.
+
+As I gazed about me looking for our line, I passed an old French
+civilian looking down at a slight mound of white stone that rose a
+little higher than the road. He was walking about uncertainly, when
+first I noticed him, as though he was not sure where he was. But now
+he stood quite still looking down at the mound.
+
+“Voilà ma maison,” he said.
+
+He said no more than that: this astounding remark, this gesture that
+indicated such calamity, were quite simply made. There was nothing
+whatever of theatrical pose that we wrongly associate with the
+French, because they conceal their emotions less secretly than we;
+there were no tragic tones in his voice: only a trace of deep
+affection showed in one of the words he used. He spoke as a woman
+might say of her only child, “Look at _my_ baby.”
+
+“Voilà ma maison,” he said.
+
+I tried to say in his language what I felt; and after my attempt he
+spoke of his house.
+
+It was very old. Down underneath, he said, it dated from feudal
+times; though I did not quite make out whether all that lay under
+that mound had been so old or whether he only meant the cellars of
+his house. It was a fine high house, he said, as much as two storeys
+high. No one that is familiar with houses of fifty storeys, none even
+that has known palaces, will smile at this old man’s efforts to tell
+of his high house, and to make me believe that it rose to two storeys
+high, as we stood together by that sad white mound. He told me that
+his son was killed. And that disaster strangely did not move me so
+much as the white mound that had been a house and had had two
+storeys, for it seems to be common to every French family with whose
+fathers I have chanced to speak in ruined cities or on busy roads of
+France.
+
+He pointed to a huge white mound beyond on the top of which someone
+had stuck a small cross of wood. “The church,” he said. And that I
+knew already.
+
+In very inadequate French I tried to comfort him. I told him that
+surely France would build his house again. Perhaps even the allies;
+for I could not believe that we shall have done enough if we merely
+drive the Germans out of France and leave this poor old man still
+wandering homeless. I told him that surely in the future Croisilles
+would stand again.
+
+He took no interest in anything that I said. His house of two storeys
+was down, his son was dead, the little village of Croisilles had gone
+away; he had only one hope from the future. When I had finished
+speaking of the future, he raised a knobbed stick that he carried, up
+to the level of his throat, surely his son’s old trench stick, and
+there he let it dangle from a piece of string in the handle, which he
+held against his neck. He watched me shrewdly and attentively
+meanwhile, for I was a stranger and was to be taught something I
+might not know—a thing that it was necessary for all men to learn.
+“Le Kaiser,” he said. “Yes;” I said, “the Kaiser.” But I pronounced
+the word Kaiser differently from him, and he repeated again “Le
+Kaiser,” and watched me closely to be sure that I understood. And
+then he said “Pendu,” and made the stick quiver a little as it
+dangled from its string. “Oui,” I said, “Pendu.”
+
+Did I understand? He was not yet quite sure. It was important that
+this thing should be quite decided between us as we stood on this
+road through what had been Croisilles, where he had lived through
+many sunny years and I had dwelt for a season amongst rats. “Pendu”
+he said. Yes, I agreed.
+
+It was all right. The old man almost smiled.
+
+I offered him a cigarette and we lit two from an apparatus of flint
+and steel and petrol that the old man had in his pocket.
+
+He showed me a photograph of himself and a passport to prove, I
+suppose, that he was not a spy. One could not recognize the likeness,
+for it must have been taken on some happier day, before he had seen
+his house of two storeys lying there by the road. But he was no spy,
+for there were tears in his eyes; and Prussians I think have no tears
+for what we saw across the village of Croisilles.
+
+I spoke of the rebuilding of his house no more, I spoke no more of
+the new Croisilles shining through future years; for these were not
+the things that he saw in the future, and these were not the hopes of
+the poor old man. He had one dark hope of the future, and no others.
+He hoped to see the Kaiser hung for the wrong he had done to
+Croisilles. It was for this hope he lived.
+
+Madame or señor of whatever far country, who may chance to see these
+words, blame not this old man for the fierce hope he cherished. It
+was the only hope he had. You, Madame, with your garden, your house,
+your church, the village where all know you, you may hope as a
+Christian should, there is wide room for hope in your future. You
+shall see the seasons move over your garden, you shall busy yourself
+with your home, and speak and share with your neighbours innumerable
+small joys, and find consolation and beauty, and at last rest, in and
+around the church whose spire you see from your home. You, señor,
+with your son perhaps growing up, perhaps wearing already some sword
+that you wore once, you can turn back to your memories or look with
+hope to the future with equal ease.
+
+The man that I met in Croisilles had none of these things at all. He
+had that one hope only.
+
+Do not, I pray you, by your voice or vote, or by any power or
+influence that you have, do anything to take away from this poor old
+Frenchman the only little hope he has left. The more trivial his odd
+hope appears to you compared with your own high hopes that come so
+easily to you amongst all your fields and houses, the more cruel a
+thing must it be to take it from him.
+
+I learned many things in Croisilles, and the last of them is this
+strange one the old man taught me. I turned and shook hands with him
+and said good-bye, for I wished to see again our old front line that
+we used to hold over the hill, now empty, silent at last. “The Boche
+is defeated,” I said.
+
+“Vaincu, vaincu,” he repeated. And I left him with something almost
+like happiness looking out of his tearful eyes.
+
+
+
+
+Bermondsey _versus_ Wurtemburg
+
+
+The trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceased
+altogether, and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of the ghosts of
+murdered trees, all grey and deserted.
+
+Descending into Albert past trees in their agony we came all at once
+on the houses. You did not see them far off as in other cities; we
+came on them all at once as you come on a corpse in the grass.
+
+We stopped and stood by a house that was covered with plaster marked
+off to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, the
+slates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel.
+Near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway
+bridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as
+though it had gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay one
+of the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there upon
+some flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it had
+been a slender cane that someone had shoved too hard into the earth.
+
+There had been a force abroad in Albert that could do these things,
+an iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical
+contrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a
+moment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal.
+
+When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come down
+upon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped and
+withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and in
+that attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcome
+by disaster.
+
+Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins,
+fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which
+they had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a
+crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London
+shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap
+knife sticking up from a murdered woman’s ribs, whose dress is long
+out of fashion.
+
+The stale smell of war arose from the desolation.
+
+A British helmet dinted in like an old bowler, but tragic not absurd,
+lay near a barrel and a teapot.
+
+On a wall that rose above a heap of dirty and smashed rafters was
+written in red paint KOMPe I.M.B.K. 184. The red paint had dripped
+down the wall from every letter. Verily we stood upon the scene of
+the murder.
+
+Opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces of
+a pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of
+grapes and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outside
+the door.
+
+Perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. I entered the
+house and looked round.
+
+A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, only
+chipped at the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. There were
+pretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was like
+the age-old dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. A man’s waistcoat
+lay on the mud and part of a woman’s stays: the waistcoat was black
+and was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to see
+on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these
+days from peace.
+
+A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of a
+corner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was an
+upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a
+hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come
+again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; the
+hand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman’s
+dress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, the
+laths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopes
+men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come
+too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway’s
+posture that ever a family would come home there again or tread those
+steps once more. And, if in some far country one should hope, who has
+not seen Albert, out of compassion for these poor people of France,
+that where a staircase still remains there may be enough of a house
+to shelter those who called it home again, I will tell one thing
+more: there blew inside that house the same wind that blew outside,
+the wind that wandered free over miles of plains wandered unchecked
+through that house; there was no indoors or outdoors any more.
+
+And on the wall of the room in which I stood, someone had proudly
+written his regiment’s name, The 156th Wurtemburgers. It was written
+in chalk; and another man had come and had written two words before
+it and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. And the writing
+remains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silent
+but for the wind and the things that creak as it blows, the only
+message of this deserted house, is this mighty record, this rare line
+of history, ill-written: “Lost by the 156th Wurtemburgers, retaken by
+the Bermondsey Butterflies.”
+
+Two men wrote that sentence between them. And, as with Homer, no one
+knows who they were. And; like Homer, their words were epic.
+
+
+
+
+On An Old Battle-Field
+
+
+I entered an old battle-field through a garden gate, a pale green
+gate by the Bapaume-Arras road. The cheerful green attracted me in
+the deeps of the desolation as an emerald might in a dust-bin. I
+entered through that homely garden gate, it had no hinges, no
+pillars, it lolled on a heap of stone: I came to it from the road;
+this alone was not battle-field; the road alone was made and tended
+and kept; all the rest was battle-field, as far as the eye could see.
+Over a large whitish heap lay a Virginia creeper, turning a dull
+crimson. And the presence of this creeper mourning there in the waste
+showed unmistakably that the heap had been a house. All the living
+things were gone that had called this white heap Home: the father
+would be fighting, somewhere; the children would have fled, if there
+had been time; the dog would have gone with them, or perhaps, if
+there was not time, he served other masters; the cat would have made
+a lair for herself and stalked mice at night through the trenches.
+All the live things that we ever consider were gone; the creeper
+alone remained, the only mourner, clinging to fallen stones that had
+supported it once.
+
+And I knew by its presence here there had been a house. And by the
+texture or composition of the ruin all round I saw that a village had
+stood there. There are calamities one does not contemplate, when one
+thinks of time and change. Death, passing away, even ruin, are all
+the human lot; but one contemplates ruin as brought by kindly ages,
+coming slowly at last, with lichen and ivy and moss, its harsher
+aspects all hidden with green, coming with dignity and in due season.
+Thus our works should pass away; our worst fears contemplated no more
+than this.
+
+But here in a single day, perhaps in a moment with one discharge from
+a battery, all the little things that one family cared for, their
+house, their garden; and the garden paths, and then the village and
+the road through the village, and the old landmarks that the old
+people remembered, and countless treasured things, were all turned
+into rubbish.
+
+And these things that one did not contemplate, have happened for
+hundreds of miles, with such disaster vast plains and hills are
+covered, because of the German war.
+
+Deep wells, old cellars, battered trenches and dug-outs, lie in the
+rubbish and weeds under the intricate wreckage of peace and war. It
+will be a bad place years hence for wanderers lost at night.
+
+When the village went, trenches came; and, in the same storm that had
+crumbled the village, the trenches withered too; shells still thump
+on to the north, but peace and war alike have deserted the village.
+Grass has begun to return over torn earth on edges of trenches.
+Abundant wire rusts away by its twisted stakes of steel. Not a path
+of old, not a lane nor a doorway there, but is barred and cut off by
+wire; and the wire in its turn has been cut by shells and lies in
+ungathered swathes. A pair of wheels moulders amongst weeds, and may
+be of peace or of war, it is too broken down for anyone to say. A
+great bar of iron lies cracked across as though one of the elder
+giants had handled it carelessly. Another mound near by, with an old
+green beam sticking out of it, was also once a house. A trench runs
+by it. A German bomb with its wooden handle, some bottles, a bucket,
+a petrol tin and some bricks and stones, lie in the trench. A young
+elder tree grows amongst them. And over all the ruin and rubbish
+Nature, with all her wealth and luxury, comes back to her old
+inheritance, holding again the land that she held so long, before the
+houses came.
+
+A garden gate of iron has been flung across a wall. Then a deep
+cellar into which a whole house seems to have slanted down. In the
+midst of all this is an orchard. A huge shell has uprooted, but not
+killed, an apple-tree; another apple-tree stands stone dead on the
+edge of a crater: most of the trees are dead. British aeroplanes
+drone over continually. A great gun goes by towards Bapaume, dragged
+by a slow engine with caterpillar wheels. The gun is all blotched
+green and yellow. Four or five men are seated on the huge barrel
+alone.
+
+Dark old steps near the orchard run down into a dug-out, with a
+cartridge-case tied to a piece of wood beside it to beat when the gas
+came. A telephone wire lies listlessly by the opening. A patch of
+Michaelmas daisies, deep mauve and pale mauve, and a bright yellow
+flower beside them, show where a garden used to stand near by. Above
+the dug-out a patch of jagged earth shows in three clear layers under
+the weeds: four inches of grey road metal, imported, for all this
+country is chalk and clay; two inches of flint below it, and under
+that an inch of a bright red stone. We are looking then at a road—a
+road through a village trodden by men and women, and the hooves of
+horses and familiar modern things, a road so buried, so shattered, so
+overgrown, showing by chance an edge in the midst of the wilderness,
+that I could seem rather to have discovered the track of the Dinosaur
+in prehistoric clays than the highway, of a little village that only
+five years ago was full of human faults and joys and songs and tiny
+tears. Down that road before the plans, of the Kaiser began to fumble
+with the earth, down that road—but it is useless to look back, we
+are too far away from five years ago, too far away from thousands of
+ordinary things, that never seemed as though they would ever peer at
+us over chasms of time, out of another age, utterly far off,
+irrevocably removed from our ways and days. They are gone, those
+times, gone like the Dinosaur; gone with bows and arrows and the old
+knightlier days. No splendour marks their sunset where I sit, no
+dignity of houses, or derelict engines of war, ruined all equally are
+scattered dirtily in the mud, and common weeds overpower them; it is
+not ruin but rubbish that covers the ground here and spreads its
+untidy flood for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
+
+A band plays in Arras, to the north and east the shells go thumping
+on.
+
+The very origins of things are in doubt, so much is jumbled together.
+It is as hard to make out just where the trenches ran, and which was
+No-Man’s-Land, as it is to tell the houses from garden and orchard
+and road: the rubbish covers all. It is as though the ancient forces
+of Chaos had come back from the abyss to fight against order and man,
+and Chaos had won. So lies this village of France.
+
+As I left it a rat, with something in its mouth, holding its head
+high, ran right across the village.
+
+
+
+
+The Real Thing
+
+
+Once at manoeuvres as the Prussian Crown Prince charged at the head
+of his regiment, as sabres gleamed, plumes streamed, and hooves
+thundered behind him, he is reported to have said to one that
+galloped near him: “Ah, if only this were the real thing!”
+
+One need not doubt that the report is true. So a young man might feel
+as he led his regiment of cavalry, for the scene would fire the
+blood; all those young men and fine uniforms and good horses, all
+coming on behind, everything streaming that could float on the air,
+everything jingling then which could ever make a sound, a bright sky
+no doubt over the uniforms, a good fresh wind for men and horses to
+gulp; and behind, the clinking and jingling, the long roll of hooves
+thundering. Such a scene might well stir emotions to sigh for the
+splendours of battle.
+
+This is one side of war. Mutilation and death are another; misery,
+cold and dirt; pain, and the intense loneliness of men left behind by
+armies, with much to think of; no hope, and a day or two to live. But
+we understand that glory covers that.
+
+There is yet a third side.
+
+I came to Albert when the fight was far from it: only at night you
+saw any signs of war, when clouds flashed now and then and curious
+rockets peered. Albert robbed of peace was deserted even by war.
+
+I will not say that Albert was devastated or desolate, for these long
+words have different interpretations and may easily be exaggerated. A
+German agent might say to you, “Devastated is rather a strong word,
+and desolate is a matter of opinion.” And so you might never know
+what Albert is like.
+
+I will tell you what I saw.
+
+Albert was a large town. I will not write of all of it.
+
+I sat down near a railway bridge at the edge of the town; I think I
+was near the station; and small houses had stood there with little
+gardens; such as porters and other railway folk would have lived in.
+I sat down on the railway and looked at one of these houses, for it
+had clearly been a house. It was at the back of it that most
+remained, in what must have been a garden. A girder torn up like a
+pack of cards lay on the leg of a table amongst a brick wall by an
+apple-tree.
+
+Lower down in the heap was the frame-work of a large four-poster bed;
+through it all a vine came up quite green and still alive; and at the
+edge of the heap lay a doll’s green pram. Small though the house had
+been there was evidence in that heap of some prosperity in more than
+one generation. For the four-poster bed had been a fine one, good
+work in sound old timber, before the bits in the girder had driven it
+into the wall; and the green pram must have been the dowry of no
+ordinary, doll, but one with the best yellow curls whose blue eyes
+could move. One blue columbine close by mourned alone for the garden.
+
+The wall and the vine and the bed and the girder lay in an orchard,
+and some of the apple-trees were standing yet, though the orchard had
+been terribly wrecked by shell fire. All that still stood were dead.
+Some stood upon the very edge of craters; their leaves and twigs and
+bark had been stripped by one blast in a moment; and they had
+tottered, with stunted, black, gesticulating branches; and so they
+stood to-day.
+
+The curls of a mattress lay on the ground, clipped once from a
+horse’s mane.
+
+After looking for some while across the orchard one suddenly noticed
+that the cathedral had stood on the other side. It was draped, when
+we saw it closer, as with a huge grey cloak, the lead of its roof
+having come down and covered it.
+
+Near the house of that petted doll (as I came to think of it) a road
+ran by on the other side of the railway. Great shells had dropped
+along it with terrible regularity. You could imagine Death striding
+down it with exact five-yard paces, on his own day, claiming his own.
+As I stood on the road something whispered behind me; and I saw,
+stirring round with the wind, in one of those footsteps of Death, a
+double page of a book open at Chapter II: and Chapter II was headed
+with the proverb, “Un Malheur Ne Vient Jamais Seul;” Misfortunes
+never come singly! And on that dreadful road, with shell-holes every
+five yards as far as the eye could see, and flat beyond it the whole
+city in ruin. What harmless girl or old man had been reading that
+dreadful prophecy when the Germans came down upon Albert and involved
+it, and themselves, and that book, all except those two pages, in
+such multiplication of ruin?
+
+Surely, indeed, there is a third side to war: for what had the doll
+done, that used to have a green pram, to deserve to share thus in the
+fall and punishment of an Emperor?
+
+
+
+
+A Garden Of Arras
+
+
+As I walked through Arras from the Spanish gate, gardens flashed as I
+went, one by one, through the houses.
+
+I stepped in over the window-sill of one of the houses, attracted by
+the gleam of a garden dimly beyond: and went through the empty house,
+empty of people, empty of furniture, empty of plaster, and entered
+the garden through an empty doorway.
+
+When I came near it seemed less like a garden. At first it had almost
+seemed to beckon to passers-by in the street, so rare are gardens now
+in this part of France, that it seemed to have more than a garden’s
+share of mystery, all in the silence there at the back of the silent
+house; but when one entered it some of the mystery went, and seemed
+to hide in a further part of the garden amongst wild shrubs and
+innumerable weeds.
+
+British aeroplanes frequently roared over, disturbing the
+congregation of Arras Cathedral a few hundred yards away, who rose
+cawing and wheeled over the garden; for only jackdaws come to Arras
+Cathedral now, besides a few pigeons.
+
+Unkempt beside me a bamboo flourished wildly, having no need of man.
+On the other side of the small wild track that had been the garden
+path the skeletons of hothouses stood, surrounded by nettles; their
+pipes lay all about, shattered and riddled through.
+
+Branches of rose break up through the myriad nettles, but only to be
+seized and choked by columbine. A late moth looks for flowers not
+quite in vain. It hovers on wing-beats that are invisibly swift by
+its lonely autumn flower, then darts away over the desolation which
+is no desolation to a moth: man has destroyed man; nature comes back;
+it is well: that must be the brief philosophy of myriads of tiny
+things whose way of life one seldom considered before; now that man’s
+cities are down, now that ruin and misery confront us whichever way
+we turn, one notices more the small things that are left.
+
+One of the greenhouses is almost all gone, a tumbled mass that might
+be a piece of Babylon, if archæologists should come to study it. But
+it is too sad to study, too untidy to have any interest, and, alas,
+too common: there are hundreds of miles of this.
+
+The other greenhouse, a sad, ungainly skeleton, is possessed by grass
+and weeds. On the raised centre many flower-pots were neatly arranged
+once: they stand in orderly lines, but each separate one is broken:
+none contain flowers any more, but only grass. And the glass of the
+greenhouse lies there in showers, all grey. No one has tidied
+anything up there for years.
+
+A meadow-sweet had come into that greenhouse and dwelt there in that
+abode of fine tropical flowers, and one night an elder tree had
+entered and is now as high as the house, and at the end of the
+greenhouse grass has come in like a wave; for change and disaster are
+far-reaching and are only mirrored here. This desolate garden and its
+ruined house are a part of hundreds of thousands such, or millions.
+Mathematics will give you no picture of what France has suffered. If
+I tell you what one garden is like, one village, one house, one
+cathedral, after the German war has swept by, and if you read my
+words, I may help you perhaps to imagine more easily what France has
+suffered than if I spoke of millions. I speak of one garden in Arras;
+and you might walk from there, south by east for weeks, and find no
+garden that has suffered less.
+
+It is all weeds and elders. An apple-tree rises out of a mass of
+nettles, but it is quite dead. Wild rose-trees show here and there,
+or roses that have ran wild like the cats of No-Man’s-Land: And once
+I saw a rose-bush that had been planted in a pot and still grew
+there, as though it still remembered man, but the flower-pot was
+shattered, like all the pots in that garden, and the rose grew wild
+as any in any hedge.
+
+The ivy alone grows on over a mighty wall, and seems to care not. The
+ivy alone seems not to mourn, but to have added the last four years
+to its growth as though they were ordinary years. That corner of the
+wall alone whispers not of disaster, it only seems to tell of the
+passing of years, which makes the ivy strong, and for which in peace
+as in war there is no cure. All the rest speaks of war, of war that
+comes to gardens, without banners or trumpets or splendour, and roots
+up everything, and turns round and smashes the house, and leaves it
+all desolate, and forgets and goes away. And when the histories of
+the war are written, attacks and counter-attacks and the doom of
+Emperors, who will remember that garden?
+
+Saddest of all, as it seemed to me watching the garden paths, were
+spiders’ webs that had been spun across them, so grey and stout and
+strong, fastened from weed to weed, with the spiders in their midst
+sitting in obvious ownership. You knew then as you looked at those
+webs across all the paths in the garden that any that you might fancy
+walking the small paths still, were but grey ghosts gone from thence,
+no more than dreams, hopes and imaginings, something altogether
+weaker than spiders webs.
+
+And the old wall of the garden that divides it from its neighbour, of
+solid stone and brick, over fifteen feet high, it is that mighty old
+wall that held the romance of the garden. I do not tell the tale of
+that garden of Arras, for that is conjecture, and I only tell what I
+saw, in order that someone perhaps in some far country may know what
+happened in thousands and thousands of gardens because an Emperor
+sighed, and longed for the splendour of war. The tale is but
+conjecture, yet all the romance is there; for picture a wall over
+fifteen feet high built as they built long ago, standing for all
+those ages between two gardens. For would not the temptation arise to
+peer over the wall if a young man heard, perhaps songs, one evening
+the other side? And at first he would have some pretext and
+afterwards none at all, and the pretext would vary wonderfully little
+with the generations, while the ivy went on growing thicker and
+thicker. The thought might come of climbing the wall altogether and
+down the other side, and it might seem too daring and be utterly put
+away. And then one day, some wonderful summer evening, the west all
+red and a new moon in the sky, far voices heard clearly and white
+mists rising, one wonderful summer day, back would come that thought
+to climb the great old wall and go down the other side. Why not go in
+next door from the street, you might say. That would be different,
+that would be calling; that would mean ceremony, black hats, and
+awkward new gloves, constrained talk and little scope for romance. It
+would all be the fault of the wall.
+
+With what diffidence, as the generations passed, would each first
+peep over the wall be undertaken. In some years it would be scaled
+from one side, in some ages from the other. What a barrier that old
+red wall would have seemed! How new the adventure would have seemed
+in each age to those that dared it, and how old to the wall! And in
+all those years the elders never made a door, but kept that huge and
+haughty separation. And the ivy quietly grew greener. And then one
+day a shell came from the east, and, in a moment, without plan or
+diffidence or pretext, tumbled away some yards of the proud old wall,
+and the two gardens were divided no longer: but there was no one to
+walk in them any more.
+
+Wistfully round the edge of the huge breach in the wall, a Michaelmas
+daisy peered into the garden, in whose ruined paths I stood.
+
+
+
+
+After Hell
+
+
+He heard an English voice shouting, “Paiper! Paiper!” No mere
+spelling of the word will give the intonation. It was the voice of
+English towns he heard again. The very voice of London in the
+morning. It seemed like magic, or like some wonderfully vivid dream.
+
+He was only a hundred miles or so from England; it was not very long
+since he had been there; yet what he heard seemed like an enchanted
+dream, because only the day before he had been in the trenches.
+
+They had been twelve days in the trenches and had marched out at
+evening. They had marched five miles and were among tin huts in quite
+a different world. Through the doorways of the huts green grass could
+be seen and the sun was shining on it. It was morning. Everything was
+strangely different. You saw more faces smiling. Men were not so calm
+as they had been during the last twelve days, the last six
+especially: someone was kicking a football at somebody else’s hut and
+there was excitement about it.
+
+Guns were still firing: but they thought of death now as one who
+walked on the other side of the hills, no longer as a neighbour, as
+one who might drop in at any moment, and sometime did, while they
+were taking tea. It was not that they had been afraid of him, but the
+strain of expectancy was over; and that strain being suddenly gone in
+a single night, they all had a need, whether they knew it or not, of
+something to take its place, so the football loomed very large.
+
+It was morning and he had slept long. The guns that grew active at
+dawn had not woke him; in those twelve days they had grown too
+familiar, but he woke wide when he heard the young English soldier
+with a bundle of three-days-old papers under his arm calling “Paiper,
+paiper!”—bringing to that strange camp the voice of the English
+towns. He woke wide at that wonder; and saw the sun shining cheerily,
+on desolation with a tinge of green in it, which even by itself
+rejoiced him on that morning after those twelve days amongst mud,
+looking at mud, surrounded by mud, protected by mud, sharing with mud
+the liability to be suddenly blown high and to come down in a shower
+on other men’s helmets and coats.
+
+He wondered if Dante when he came up from Hell heard anyone calling
+amongst the Verdure, in sunlight, any familiar call such as merchants
+use, some trivial song or cry of his native city.
+
+
+
+
+A Happy Valley
+
+
+“The enemy attacked the Happy Valley.” I read these words in a paper
+at the time of the taking of Albert, for the second time, by our
+troops. And the words brought back Albert to me like a spell, Albert
+at the end of the mighty Bapaume-Albert road, that pathway of Mars
+down which he had stalked so tremendously through his garden, the
+wide waste battlefields of the Somme. The words brought back Albert
+at the end of that road in the sunset and the cathedral seen against
+the west, and the gilded Virgin half cast down, but incapable of
+losing dignity, and evening coming down over the marshes. They
+brought it back like a spell. Like two spells rather, that some
+magician had mixed. Picture some magician of old in his sombre
+wonderful, chamber wishing dreams to transport him far off to
+delectable valleys. He sits him down and writes out a spell on
+parchment, slowly and with effort of aged memory, though he
+remembered it easily once. The shadows of crocodiles and antique gods
+flicker on walls and ceiling from a gusty flame as he writes; and in
+the end he writes the spell out wrongly and mixes up with the valleys
+where he would rest dark bits of the regions of Hell. So one sees
+Albert again and its Happy Valley.
+
+I do not know which the Happy Valley is, for so many little valleys
+run in and out about Albert; and with a little effort of imagination,
+having only seen them full of the ruin of war, one can fancy any of
+them being once named happy. Yet one there is away to the east of
+Albert, which even up to last autumn seemed able to bear this name,
+so secluded it was in that awful garden of Mars; a tiny valley
+running into the wood of Bécourt. A few yards, higher up and all was
+desolation, a little further along a lonely road and you saw Albert
+mourning over irreparable vistas of ruin and wasted fields; but the
+little valley ran into the wood of Bécourt and sheltered there, and
+there you saw scarcely any signs of war. It might almost have been an
+English valley, by the side of an English wood. The soil was the same
+brown clay that you see in the south of England above the downs and
+the chalk; the wood was a hazel wood, such as grow in England,
+thinned a good deal, as English hazels are, but with several tall
+trees still growing; and plants were there and late flowers, such as
+grow in Surrey and Kent. And at the end of the valley, just in the
+shadow of that familiar homely wood, a hundred British officers rest
+for ever.
+
+As the world is to-day perhaps that obscure spot, as fittingly as any,
+might be named the Happy Valley.
+
+
+
+
+In Bethune
+
+
+Under all ruins is history, as every tourist knows. Indeed, the dust
+that gathers above the ruin of cities may be said to be the cover of
+the most wonderful of the picture-books of Time, those secret books
+into which we sometimes peep. We turn no more, perhaps, than the
+corner of a single page in our prying, but we catch a glimpse there
+of things so gorgeous, in the book that we are not meant to see, that
+it is worth while to travel to far countries, whoever can, to see one
+of those books, and where the edges are turned up a little to catch
+sight of those strange winged bulls and mysterious kings and
+lion-headed gods that were not meant for us. And out of the glimpses
+one catches from odd corners of those volumes of Time, where old
+centuries hide, one builds up part by guesses, part by fancy mixed
+with but little knowledge, a tale or theory of how men and women
+lived in unknown ages in the faith of forgotten gods.
+
+Such a people lived in Timgad and left it probably about the time
+that waning Rome began to call home her outposts. Long after the
+citizens left the city stood on that high plateau in Africa, teaching
+shepherd Arabs what Rome had been: even to-day its great arches and
+parts of its temples stand: its paved streets are still grooved
+clearly with the wheel-ruts of chariots, and beaten down on each side
+of the centre by the pairs of horses that drew them two thousand
+years ago. When all the clatter had died away Timgad stood there in
+silence.
+
+At Pompeii, city and citizens ended together. Pompeii did not mourn
+among strangers, a city without a people: but was buried at once,
+closed like an ancient book.
+
+I doubt if anyone knows why its gods deserted Luxor, or Luxor lost
+faith in its gods, or in itself; conquest from over the desert or
+down the Nile, I suppose, or corruption within. Who knows? But one
+day I saw a woman come out from the back of her house and empty a
+basket full of dust and rubbish right into the temple at Luxor, where
+a dark green god is seated, three times the size of a man, buried as
+high as his waist. I suppose that what I saw had been happening off
+and on pretty well every morning for the last four thousand years.
+Safe under the dust that that woman threw, and the women that lived
+before her, Time hid his secrets.
+
+And then I have seen the edges of stones in deserts that might or
+might not have been cities: they had fallen so long that you could
+hardly say.
+
+At all these cities, whether disaster met them, and ruin came
+suddenly on to crowded streets; or whether they passed slowly out of
+fashion, and grew quieter year by year while the jackals drew nearer
+and nearer; at all these cities one can look with interest and not be
+saddened by the faintest sorrow—for anything that happened to such a
+different people so very long ago. Ram-headed gods, although their
+horns be broken and all their worshippers gone; armies whose
+elephants have turned against them; kings whose ancestors have
+eclipsed their faces in heaven and left them helpless against the
+onslaught of the stars; not a tear is given for one of these to-day.
+
+But when in ruins as complete as Pompeii, as desolate as Timgad
+amongst its African hills, you see the remnant of a pack of cards
+lying with what remains of the stock of a draper’s shop; and the
+front part of the shop and the snug room at the back gape side by
+side together in equal, misery, as though there had never been a
+barrier between the counter with its wares and the good mahogany
+table with its decanters; then in the rustling of papers that blow
+with dust along long-desolate floors one hears the whisper of
+Disaster, saying, “See; I have come.” For under plaster shaken down
+by calamity, and red dust that once was bricks, it is our own age
+that is lying; and the little things that lie about the floors are
+relics of the twentieth century. Therefore in the streets of Bethune
+the wistful appeal that is in all things lost far off and utterly
+passed away cries out with an insistence that is never felt in the
+older fallen cities. No doubt to future times the age that lies under
+plaster in Bethune, with thin, bare laths standing over it, will
+appear an age of glory; and yet to thousands that went one day from
+its streets, leaving all manner of small things behind, it may well
+have been an age full of far other promises, no less golden to them,
+no less magical even, though too little to stir the pen of History,
+busy with batteries and imperial dooms. So that to these, whatever
+others may write, the twentieth century will not be the age of
+strategy, but will only seem to have been those fourteen lost quiet
+summers whose fruits lie under the plaster.
+
+That layer of plaster and brick-dust lies on the age that has gone,
+as final, as fatal, as the layer of flints that covers the top of the
+chalk and marks the end of an epoch and some unknown geologic
+catastrophe.
+
+It is only by the little things in Bethune, lying where they were
+left, that one can trace at all what kind of house each was, or guess
+at the people who dwelt in it. It is only by a potato growing where
+Pavement was, and flowering vigorously under a vacant window, that
+one can guess that the battered, house beside it was once a
+fruiterer’s shop, whence the potato rolled away when man fell on evil
+days, and found the street, no longer harsh and unfriendly; but soft
+and fertile like the primal waste, and took root and throve there as
+its forbears throve before it in another continent before the coming
+of man.
+
+Across the street, in the dust of a stricken house, the implements of
+his trade show where a carpenter lived when disaster came so
+suddenly, quite good tools, some still upon shelves, some amongst
+broken things that lie all over the floor. And further along the
+street in which these things are someone has put up a great iron
+shutter that was to protect his shop. It has a graceful border of
+painted irises all the way up each side. It might have been a
+jeweller that would have had such a shutter. The shutter alone
+remains standing straight upright, and the whole shop is gone.
+
+And just here the shaken street ends and all the streets end
+together. The rest is a mound of white stones and pieces of bricks
+with low, leaning walls surrounding it, and the halves of hollow
+houses; and eyeing it round a corner, one old tower of the cathedral,
+as though still gazing over its congregation of houses, a ruined,
+melancholy watcher. Over the bricks lie tracks, but no more streets.
+It is about the middle of the town, a hawk goes over, calling as
+though he flew over the waste, and as though the waste were his. The
+breeze that carries him opens old shutters and flaps them to again.
+Old, useless hinges moan; wall-paper whispers. Three French soldiers
+trying to find their homes walk over the bricks and groundsel.
+
+It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in
+some fabulous future, nor remembered from terrible ages by the aid
+of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of
+folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics
+of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken
+bricks.
+
+
+
+
+In An Old Drawing-Room
+
+
+There was one house with a roof on it in Peronne. And there an
+officer came by moonlight on his way back from leave. He was looking
+for his battalion which had moved and was now somewhere in the
+desolation out in front of Peronne, or else was marching there—no
+one quite knew. Someone said he had seen it marching through
+Tincourt; the R.T.O. said Brie. Those who did not know were always
+ready to help, they made suggestions and even pulled out maps. Why
+should they not? They were giving away no secret, because they did
+not know, and so they followed a soldier’s natural inclination to
+give all the help they could to another soldier. Therefore they
+offered their suggestions like old friends. They had never met
+before, might never meet again; but La France introduces you, and
+five minute acquaintance in a place like Peronne, where things may
+change so profoundly in one night, and where all is so tense by the
+strange background of ruin that little portions of time seem very
+valuable, five minutes there seem quite a long time. And so they are,
+for what may not happen in five minutes any day now in France. Five
+minutes may be a page of history, a chapter even, perhaps a volume.
+Little children with inky fingers years hence may sit for a whole
+hour trying to learn up and remember just what happened during five
+minutes in France some time about now. These are just reflections
+such as pass through the mind in the moonlight among vast ruins and
+are at once forgotten.
+
+Those that knew where the battalion was that the wandering officer
+looked for were not many; these were reserved and spoke like one that
+has a murder on his conscience, not freely and openly: for of one
+thing no one speaks in France, and that is the exact position of a
+unit. One may wave one’s hand vaguely eastwards and say “Over
+there,”, but to name a village and the people that occupy it is to
+offend against the silence that in these days broods over France, the
+solemn hush befitting so vast a tragedy.
+
+And in the end it seemed better to that officer to obey the R.T.O.
+and to go by his train to Brie that left in the morning, and that
+question settled, there remained only food and sleep.
+
+Down in the basement of the big house with a roof there was a
+kitchen, in fact there was everything that a house should have; and
+the more that one saw of simple household things, tables, chairs, the
+fire in the kitchen, pieces of carpet, floors, ceilings, and even
+windows, the more one wondered; it did not seem natural in Peronne.
+
+Picture to yourself a fine drawing-room with high ornamental walls
+and all the air about it of dignity, peace and ease, that were so
+recently gone; only just, as it might have been, stepped through the
+double doorway; skirts, as it were, of ladies only just trailed out
+of sight; and then turn in fancy to that great town streaming with
+moonlight, full of the mystery that moonlight always brings, but
+without the light of it; all black, dark as caverns of earth where no
+light ever came, blacker for the moonlight than if no moon were
+there; sombre, mourning and accursed, each house in the great streets
+sheltering darkness amongst its windowless walls; as though it nursed
+disaster, having no other children left, and would not let the moon
+peer in on its grief or see the monstrous orphan that it fondled.
+
+In the old drawing-room with twenty others, the wandering officer lay
+down to sleep on the floor, and thought of old wars that came to the
+cities of France a long while ago. To just such houses as this, he
+thought, men must have come before and gone on next day to fight in
+other centuries; it seemed to him that it must have been more
+romantic then. Who knows?
+
+He had a bit of carpet to lie on. A few more officers came in in the
+early part of the night, and talked a little and lay down. A few
+candles were stuck on tables here and there. Midnight would have
+struck from the towers had any clock been left to strike in Peronne.
+Still talk went on in low voices here and there. The candles burned
+low and were fewer. Big shadows floated along those old high walls.
+Then the talk ceased and everyone was still: nothing stirred but the
+shadows. An officer muttered in sleep of things far thence, and was
+silent. Far away shells thumped faintly. The shadows, left to
+themselves, went round and round the room, searching in every corner
+for something that was lost. Over walls and ceiling they went and
+could not find it. The last candle was failing. It flared and
+guttered. The shadows raced over the room from corner to corner. Lost,
+and they could not find it. They hurried desperately in those last
+few moments. Great shadows searching for some little thing. In the
+smallest nook they sought for it. Then the last candle died. As the
+flame went up with the smoke from the fallen wick all the great
+shadows turned and mournfully trailed away.
+
+
+
+
+The Homes Of Arras
+
+
+As you come to Arras by the western road, by the red ramparts and the
+Spanish gate, Arras looks like a king. With such a dignity as clings
+to the ancient gateway so might a king be crowned; with such a sweep
+of dull red as the old ramparts show, so might he be robed; but a
+dead king with crowned skull. For the ways of Arras are empty but for
+brown soldiers, and her houses are bare as bones.
+
+Arras sleeps profoundly, roofless, windowless, carpetless; Arras
+sleeps as a skeleton sleeps, with all the dignity of former days
+about it, but the life that stirs in its streets is not the old
+city’s life, the old city is murdered. I came to Arras and went down
+a street, and saw back gardens glinting through the bare ribs of the
+houses. Garden after garden shone, so far as it could, though it was
+in October and after four years of war; but what was left of those
+gardens shining there in the sun was like sad faces trying to smile
+after many disasters.
+
+I came to a great wall that no shell had breached. A cascade of
+scarlet creeper poured over it, as though on the other side some
+serene garden grew, where no disaster came, tended by girls who had
+never heard of war, walking untrodden paths. It was not so. But one’s
+fancy, weary of ruin, readily turns to such scenes wherever facts are
+hidden, though but by a tottering wall, led by a few bright leaves or
+the glimpse of a flower.
+
+But not for any fancy of mine must you picture ruin any more as
+something graced with splendour, or as it were an argosy reaching the
+shores of our day laden with grandeur and dignity out of antiquity.
+Ruin to-day is not covered with ivy, and has no curious architecture
+or strange secrets of history, and is not beautiful or romantic at
+all. It has no tale to tell of old civilizations, not otherwise
+known, told of by few grey stones. Ruin to-day is destruction and
+sorrow and debt and loss, come down untidily upon modern homes and
+cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar
+trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the
+guardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget:
+ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has
+ceased to be still green in our memory. Quite ordinary wardrobes in
+unseemly attitudes gape out from bedrooms whose front walls are gone,
+in houses whose most inner design shows unconcealed to the cold gaze
+of the street. The rooms have neither mystery nor adornment. Burst
+mattresses loll down from bedraggled beds. No one has come to tidy
+them up for years. And roofs have slanted down as low as the first
+floor.
+
+I saw a green door ajar in an upper room: the whole of the front wall
+of the house was gone: the door partly opened oddly on to a little
+staircase, whose steps one could just see, that one wondered whither
+it went. The door seemed to beckon and beckon to some lost room, but
+if one could ever have got there, up through that shattered house,
+and if the steps of that little staircase would bear, so that one
+came to, the room that is hidden away at the top, yet there could
+only be silence and spiders there, and broken plaster and the dust of
+calamity; it is only to memories that the green door beckons; nothing
+remains.
+
+And some day they may come to Arras to see the romance of war, to see
+where the shells struck and to pick up pieces of iron. It is not this
+that is romantic, not Mars, but poor, limping Peace. It is what is
+left that appeals to you, with pathos and infinite charm; little
+desolate gardens that no one has tended for years, wall-paper left in
+forlorn rooms when all else is scattered, old toys buried in rubbish,
+old steps untrodden on inaccessible landings: it is what is left that
+appeals to you, what remains of old peaceful things. The great guns
+throb on, all round is the panoply of war, if panoply be the right
+word for this vast disaster that is known to Arras as innumerable
+separate sorrows; but it is not to this great event that the sympathy
+turns in Arras, nor to its thunder and show, nor the trappings of it,
+guns, lorries, and fragments of shells: it is to the voiceless,
+deserted inanimate things, so greatly wronged, that all the heart
+goes out: floors fallen in festoons, windows that seem to be wailing,
+roofs as though crazed with grief and then petrified in their
+craziness; railings, lamp-posts, sticks, all hit, nothing spared by
+that frenzied iron: the very earth clawed and-torn: it is what is
+left that appeals to you.
+
+As I went from Arras I passed by a grey, gaunt shape, the ghost of a
+railway station standing in the wilderness haunting a waste of weeds,
+and mourning, as it seemed, over rusted railway lines lying idle and
+purposeless as though leading nowhere, as though all roads had
+ceased, and all lands were deserted, and all travellers dead:
+sorrowful and lonely that ghostly shape stood dumb in the desolation
+among houses whose doors were shut and their windows broken. And in
+all that stricken assembly no voice spoke but the sound of iron
+tapping on broken things, which was dumb awhile when the wind
+dropped. The wind rose and it tapped again.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13820 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #13820 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13820)
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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13820 ***
+
+
+
+
+UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS
+
+
+by Lord Dunsany
+
+
+1919
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+
+I have chosen a title that shall show that I make no claim for this
+book to be “up-to-date.” As the first title indicates, I hoped to
+show, to as many as might to read my words, something of the extent
+of the wrongs that the people of France had suffered. There is no
+such need any longer. The tales, so far as they went, I gather
+together here for the few that seem to read my books in England.
+
+                                                            Dunsany.
+
+
+
+
+A Dirge Of Victory (Sonnet)
+
+
+Lift not thy trumpet, Victory, to the sky,
+  Nor through battalions nor by batteries blow,
+  But over hollows full of old wire go,
+Where among dregs of war the long-dead lie
+With wasted iron that the guns passed by.
+  When they went eastwards like a tide at flow;
+  There blow thy trumpet that the dead may know,
+Who waited for thy coming, Victory.
+
+It is not we that have deserved thy wreath,
+  They waited there among the towering weeds.
+The deep mud burned under the thermite’s breath,
+  And winter cracked the bones that no man heeds:
+Hundreds of nights flamed by: the seasons passed.
+And thou last come to them at last, at last!
+
+
+
+
+The Cathedral Of Arras
+
+
+On the great steps of Arras Cathedral I saw a procession, in silence,
+standing still.
+
+They were in orderly and perfect lines, stirring or swaying slightly:
+sometimes they bent their heads, sometimes two leaned together, but
+for the most part they were motionless. It was the time when the
+fashion is just changing and some were newly all in shining yellow,
+while others still wore green.
+
+I went up the steps amongst them, the only human thing, for men and
+women worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have come
+instead; little humble things, all less than four years old, in great
+numbers thronging the steps processionally, and growing in perfect
+rows just where step meets step. They have come to Arras with the
+wind and the rain; which enter the aisles together whenever they
+will, and go wherever man went; they have such a reverent air, the
+young limes on the three flights of steps, that you would say they
+did not know that Arras Cathedral was fallen on evil days, that they
+did not know they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but thought that
+these great walls open to stars and sun were the natural and fitting
+place for the worship of little weeds.
+
+Behind them the shattered houses of Arras seemed to cluster about the
+cathedral as, one might fancy easily, hurt and frightened children,
+so wistful are their gaping windows and old, grey empty gables, so
+melancholy and puzzled. They are more like a little old people come
+upon trouble, gazing at their great elder companion and not knowing
+what to do.
+
+But the facts of Arras are sadder than a poet’s most tragic fancies.
+In the western front of Arras Cathedral stand eight pillars rising
+from the ground; above them stood four more. Of the four upper
+pillars the two on the left are gone, swept away by shells from the
+north: and a shell has passed through the neck of one of the two that
+is left, just as a bullet might go through a daffodil’s stem.
+
+The left-hand corner of that western wall has been caught from the
+north, by some tremendous shell which has torn the whole corner down
+in a mound of stone: and still the walls have stood.
+
+I went in through the western doorway. All along the nave lay a long
+heap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a little
+trodden path over the grass and weeds. This is all that remained of
+the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may have
+been in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them. It was
+all down but one slender arch that crossed the nave just at the
+transept; it stood out against the sky, and all who saw it wondered
+how it stood.
+
+In the southern aisle panes of green glass, in twisted frame of lead,
+here and there lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple-tree-after a
+hailstorm in spring. The aisles still had their roofs over them which
+those stout old walls held up in spite of all.
+
+Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous. Perhaps
+there was more to bring down there, so the Germans brought it down:
+there may have been a tower there, for all I know, or a spire.
+
+I stood on the heap and looked towards the altar. To my left all was
+ruin. To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.
+The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened,
+partly broken. A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was
+this that had opened the door.
+
+Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something
+made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.
+
+As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate
+sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a
+sad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemed
+to be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been the
+cathedral; perhaps she had once been the Bishop’s servant, or the
+wife of one of the vergers; she only remained of all who had been
+there in other days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws. I spoke to
+her. All Arras, she said, was ruined. The great cathedral was ruined,
+her own family were ruined utterly, and she pointed to where the sad
+houses gazed from forlorn dead windows. Absolute ruin, she said; but
+there must be no armistice. No armistice. No. It was necessary that
+there should be no armistice at all. No armistice with Germans.
+
+She passed on, resolute and sad, and the guns boomed on beyond Arras.
+
+A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes’ heads on his collar, showed
+me a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was five
+years ago. It was the very chancel before which I was standing. To
+see that photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera that
+took it must have stood where I was standing, only a little lower
+down, under the great heap. Though one knew there had been an altar
+there, and candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of a
+cathedral’s interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on that
+weedy heap, in the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast with
+which the mind fumbled.
+
+I walked a little with the French interpreter. We came to a little
+shrine in the southern aisle. It had been all paved with marble, and
+the marble was broken into hundreds of pieces, and someone had
+carefully picked up all the bits, and laid them together on the
+altar.
+
+And this pathetic heap that was gathered of broken bits had drawn
+many to stop and gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they had
+written their names on them: every bit had a name on it, with but a
+touch of irony the Frenchman said, “All that is necessary to bring
+your name to posterity is to write it on one of these stones.”, “No,”
+I said, “I will do it by describing all this.” And we both laughed.
+
+I have not done it yet: there is more to say of Arras. As I begin the
+tale of ruin and wrong, the man who did it totters. His gaudy power
+begins to stream away like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne will
+be bare, and I shall have but begun to say what I have to say of
+calamity in cathedral and little gardens of Arras.
+
+The winter of the Hohenzollerns will come; sceptre, uniforms, stars
+and courtiers all gone; still the world will not know half of the
+bitter wrongs of Arras. And spring will bring a new time and cover
+the trenches with green, and the pigeons will preen themselves on the
+shattered towers, and the lime-trees along the steps will grow taller
+and brighter, and happier men will sing in the streets untroubled by
+any War Lord; by then, perhaps, I may have told, to such as care to
+read, what such a war did in an ancient town, already romantic when
+romance was young, when war came suddenly without mercy, without
+pity, out of the north and east, on little houses, carved galleries,
+and gardens; churches, cathedrals and the jackdaws’ nests.
+
+
+
+
+A Good War
+
+
+Nietsche said, “You have heard that a good cause justifies any war,
+but I say unto you that a good war justifies any cause.”
+
+A man was walking alone over a plain so desolate that, if you have
+never seen it, the mere word desolation could never convey to you the
+melancholy surroundings that mourned about this man on his lonely
+walk. Far off a vista of trees followed a cheerless road all dead as
+mourners suddenly stricken dead in some funereal procession. By this
+road he had come; but when he had reached a certain point he turned
+from the road at once, branching away to the left, led by a line of
+bushes that may once have been a lane. For some while his feet had
+rustled through long neglected grass; sometimes he lifted them up to
+step over a telephone wire that lolled over old entanglements and
+bushes; often he came to rusty strands of barbed wire and walked
+through them where they had been cut, perhaps years ago, by huge
+shells; then his feet hissed on through the grass again, dead grass
+that had hissed about his boots all through the afternoon.
+
+Once he sat down to rest on the edge of a crater, weary with such
+walking as he had never seen before; and after he had stayed there a
+little while a cat that seemed to have its home in that wild place
+started suddenly up and leaped away over the weeds. It seemed an
+animal totally wild, and utterly afraid of man.
+
+Grey bare hills surrounded the waste: a partridge called far off:
+evening was drawing in. He rose wearily, and yet with a certain
+fervour, as one that pursues With devotion a lamentable quest.
+Looking round him as he left his resting-place he saw a cabbage or
+two that after some while had come back to what was a field and had
+sprouted on the edge of a shell-hole. A yellowing convolvulus climbed
+up a dead weed. Weeds, grass and tumbled earth were all about him. It
+would be no better when he went on. Still he went on. A flower or two
+peeped up among the weeds. He stood up and looked at the landscape
+and drew no hope from that, the shattered trunk of a stricken tree
+leered near him, white trenches scarred the hillside. He followed an
+old trench through a hedge of elder, passed under more wire, by a
+great rusty shell that had not burst, passed by a dug-out where
+something grey seemed to lie down at the bottom of many steps. Black
+fungi grew near the entrance. He went on and on over shell-holes,
+passing round them where they were deep, stepping into or over the
+small ones. Little burrs clutched at him; he went rustling on, the
+only sound in the waste but the clicking of shattered iron. Now he
+was among nettles. He came by many small unnatural valleys. He passed
+more trenches only guarded by fungi. While it was light he followed
+little paths, marvelling who made them. Once he got into a trench.
+Dandelions leaned across it as though to bar his way, believing man
+to have gone and to have no right to return. Weeds thronged, in
+thousands here. It was the day of the weeds. It was only they that
+seemed to triumph in those fields deserted of man. He passed on down
+the trench and never knew whose trench it once had been. Frightful
+shells had smashed it here and there, and had twisted iron as though
+round gigantic fingers that had twiddled it idly a moment and let it
+drop to lie in the rain for ever. He passed more dug-outs and black
+fungi, watching them; and then he left the trench, going straight on
+over the open: again dead grasses hissed about his feet, sometimes
+small wire sang faintly He passed through a belt of nettles and
+thence to dead grass again. And now the light of the afternoon was
+beginning to dwindle away. He had intended to reach his journey’s end
+by daylight, for he was past the time of life when one wanders after
+dark, but he had not contemplated the difficulty of walking over that
+road, or dreamed that lanes he knew could be so foundered and merged,
+in that mournful desolate moor.
+
+Evening was filling fast, still he kept on. It was the time when the
+cornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turn
+grey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit their
+innumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation:
+and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound of
+iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound that
+would haunt the waste for ever.
+
+And evening settled down, a huge grey canvas waiting for sombre
+pictures; a setting for all the dark tales of the world, haunted
+forever a grizzly place was haunted ever, in any century, in any
+land; but not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and
+half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things
+huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions,
+under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was
+villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two
+Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering for
+dominion of the world.
+
+The cold wind blew over the blasted heath and bits of broken iron
+flapped on and on.
+
+And now the traveller hurried, for night was falling, and such a
+night as three witches might have brewed in a cauldron. He went on
+eagerly but with infinite sadness. Over the sky-line strange rockets
+went up from the war, peered oddly over the earth and went down
+again. Very far off a few soldiers lit a little fire of their own.
+The night grew colder; tap, tap, went broken iron.
+
+And at last the traveller stopped in the lonely night and looked
+round him attentively, and appeared to be satisfied that he had come
+within sight of his journey’s end, although to ordinary eyes the spot
+to which he had come differed in no way from the rest of the waste.
+
+He went no further, but turned round and round, peering piece by
+piece at that weedy and cratered earth.
+
+He was looking for the village where he was born.
+
+
+
+
+The House With Two Storeys
+
+
+I came again to Croisilles.
+
+I looked for the sunken road that we used to hold in support, with
+its row of little shelters in the bank and the carved oak saints
+above them here and there that had survived the church in Croisilles.
+I could have found it with my eyes shut. With my eyes open I could
+not find it. I did not recognize the lonely metalled road down which
+lorries were rushing for the little lane so full of life, whose
+wheel-ruts were three years old.
+
+As I gazed about me looking for our line, I passed an old French
+civilian looking down at a slight mound of white stone that rose a
+little higher than the road. He was walking about uncertainly, when
+first I noticed him, as though he was not sure where he was. But now
+he stood quite still looking down at the mound.
+
+“Voilà ma maison,” he said.
+
+He said no more than that: this astounding remark, this gesture that
+indicated such calamity, were quite simply made. There was nothing
+whatever of theatrical pose that we wrongly associate with the
+French, because they conceal their emotions less secretly than we;
+there were no tragic tones in his voice: only a trace of deep
+affection showed in one of the words he used. He spoke as a woman
+might say of her only child, “Look at _my_ baby.”
+
+“Voilà ma maison,” he said.
+
+I tried to say in his language what I felt; and after my attempt he
+spoke of his house.
+
+It was very old. Down underneath, he said, it dated from feudal
+times; though I did not quite make out whether all that lay under
+that mound had been so old or whether he only meant the cellars of
+his house. It was a fine high house, he said, as much as two storeys
+high. No one that is familiar with houses of fifty storeys, none even
+that has known palaces, will smile at this old man’s efforts to tell
+of his high house, and to make me believe that it rose to two storeys
+high, as we stood together by that sad white mound. He told me that
+his son was killed. And that disaster strangely did not move me so
+much as the white mound that had been a house and had had two
+storeys, for it seems to be common to every French family with whose
+fathers I have chanced to speak in ruined cities or on busy roads of
+France.
+
+He pointed to a huge white mound beyond on the top of which someone
+had stuck a small cross of wood. “The church,” he said. And that I
+knew already.
+
+In very inadequate French I tried to comfort him. I told him that
+surely France would build his house again. Perhaps even the allies;
+for I could not believe that we shall have done enough if we merely
+drive the Germans out of France and leave this poor old man still
+wandering homeless. I told him that surely in the future Croisilles
+would stand again.
+
+He took no interest in anything that I said. His house of two storeys
+was down, his son was dead, the little village of Croisilles had gone
+away; he had only one hope from the future. When I had finished
+speaking of the future, he raised a knobbed stick that he carried, up
+to the level of his throat, surely his son’s old trench stick, and
+there he let it dangle from a piece of string in the handle, which he
+held against his neck. He watched me shrewdly and attentively
+meanwhile, for I was a stranger and was to be taught something I
+might not know—a thing that it was necessary for all men to learn.
+“Le Kaiser,” he said. “Yes;” I said, “the Kaiser.” But I pronounced
+the word Kaiser differently from him, and he repeated again “Le
+Kaiser,” and watched me closely to be sure that I understood. And
+then he said “Pendu,” and made the stick quiver a little as it
+dangled from its string. “Oui,” I said, “Pendu.”
+
+Did I understand? He was not yet quite sure. It was important that
+this thing should be quite decided between us as we stood on this
+road through what had been Croisilles, where he had lived through
+many sunny years and I had dwelt for a season amongst rats. “Pendu”
+he said. Yes, I agreed.
+
+It was all right. The old man almost smiled.
+
+I offered him a cigarette and we lit two from an apparatus of flint
+and steel and petrol that the old man had in his pocket.
+
+He showed me a photograph of himself and a passport to prove, I
+suppose, that he was not a spy. One could not recognize the likeness,
+for it must have been taken on some happier day, before he had seen
+his house of two storeys lying there by the road. But he was no spy,
+for there were tears in his eyes; and Prussians I think have no tears
+for what we saw across the village of Croisilles.
+
+I spoke of the rebuilding of his house no more, I spoke no more of
+the new Croisilles shining through future years; for these were not
+the things that he saw in the future, and these were not the hopes of
+the poor old man. He had one dark hope of the future, and no others.
+He hoped to see the Kaiser hung for the wrong he had done to
+Croisilles. It was for this hope he lived.
+
+Madame or señor of whatever far country, who may chance to see these
+words, blame not this old man for the fierce hope he cherished. It
+was the only hope he had. You, Madame, with your garden, your house,
+your church, the village where all know you, you may hope as a
+Christian should, there is wide room for hope in your future. You
+shall see the seasons move over your garden, you shall busy yourself
+with your home, and speak and share with your neighbours innumerable
+small joys, and find consolation and beauty, and at last rest, in and
+around the church whose spire you see from your home. You, señor,
+with your son perhaps growing up, perhaps wearing already some sword
+that you wore once, you can turn back to your memories or look with
+hope to the future with equal ease.
+
+The man that I met in Croisilles had none of these things at all. He
+had that one hope only.
+
+Do not, I pray you, by your voice or vote, or by any power or
+influence that you have, do anything to take away from this poor old
+Frenchman the only little hope he has left. The more trivial his odd
+hope appears to you compared with your own high hopes that come so
+easily to you amongst all your fields and houses, the more cruel a
+thing must it be to take it from him.
+
+I learned many things in Croisilles, and the last of them is this
+strange one the old man taught me. I turned and shook hands with him
+and said good-bye, for I wished to see again our old front line that
+we used to hold over the hill, now empty, silent at last. “The Boche
+is defeated,” I said.
+
+“Vaincu, vaincu,” he repeated. And I left him with something almost
+like happiness looking out of his tearful eyes.
+
+
+
+
+Bermondsey _versus_ Wurtemburg
+
+
+The trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceased
+altogether, and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of the ghosts of
+murdered trees, all grey and deserted.
+
+Descending into Albert past trees in their agony we came all at once
+on the houses. You did not see them far off as in other cities; we
+came on them all at once as you come on a corpse in the grass.
+
+We stopped and stood by a house that was covered with plaster marked
+off to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, the
+slates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel.
+Near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway
+bridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as
+though it had gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay one
+of the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there upon
+some flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it had
+been a slender cane that someone had shoved too hard into the earth.
+
+There had been a force abroad in Albert that could do these things,
+an iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical
+contrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a
+moment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal.
+
+When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come down
+upon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped and
+withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and in
+that attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcome
+by disaster.
+
+Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins,
+fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which
+they had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a
+crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London
+shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap
+knife sticking up from a murdered woman’s ribs, whose dress is long
+out of fashion.
+
+The stale smell of war arose from the desolation.
+
+A British helmet dinted in like an old bowler, but tragic not absurd,
+lay near a barrel and a teapot.
+
+On a wall that rose above a heap of dirty and smashed rafters was
+written in red paint KOMPe I.M.B.K. 184. The red paint had dripped
+down the wall from every letter. Verily we stood upon the scene of
+the murder.
+
+Opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces of
+a pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of
+grapes and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outside
+the door.
+
+Perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. I entered the
+house and looked round.
+
+A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, only
+chipped at the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. There were
+pretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was like
+the age-old dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. A man’s waistcoat
+lay on the mud and part of a woman’s stays: the waistcoat was black
+and was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to see
+on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these
+days from peace.
+
+A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of a
+corner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was an
+upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a
+hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come
+again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; the
+hand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman’s
+dress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, the
+laths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopes
+men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come
+too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway’s
+posture that ever a family would come home there again or tread those
+steps once more. And, if in some far country one should hope, who has
+not seen Albert, out of compassion for these poor people of France,
+that where a staircase still remains there may be enough of a house
+to shelter those who called it home again, I will tell one thing
+more: there blew inside that house the same wind that blew outside,
+the wind that wandered free over miles of plains wandered unchecked
+through that house; there was no indoors or outdoors any more.
+
+And on the wall of the room in which I stood, someone had proudly
+written his regiment’s name, The 156th Wurtemburgers. It was written
+in chalk; and another man had come and had written two words before
+it and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. And the writing
+remains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silent
+but for the wind and the things that creak as it blows, the only
+message of this deserted house, is this mighty record, this rare line
+of history, ill-written: “Lost by the 156th Wurtemburgers, retaken by
+the Bermondsey Butterflies.”
+
+Two men wrote that sentence between them. And, as with Homer, no one
+knows who they were. And; like Homer, their words were epic.
+
+
+
+
+On An Old Battle-Field
+
+
+I entered an old battle-field through a garden gate, a pale green
+gate by the Bapaume-Arras road. The cheerful green attracted me in
+the deeps of the desolation as an emerald might in a dust-bin. I
+entered through that homely garden gate, it had no hinges, no
+pillars, it lolled on a heap of stone: I came to it from the road;
+this alone was not battle-field; the road alone was made and tended
+and kept; all the rest was battle-field, as far as the eye could see.
+Over a large whitish heap lay a Virginia creeper, turning a dull
+crimson. And the presence of this creeper mourning there in the waste
+showed unmistakably that the heap had been a house. All the living
+things were gone that had called this white heap Home: the father
+would be fighting, somewhere; the children would have fled, if there
+had been time; the dog would have gone with them, or perhaps, if
+there was not time, he served other masters; the cat would have made
+a lair for herself and stalked mice at night through the trenches.
+All the live things that we ever consider were gone; the creeper
+alone remained, the only mourner, clinging to fallen stones that had
+supported it once.
+
+And I knew by its presence here there had been a house. And by the
+texture or composition of the ruin all round I saw that a village had
+stood there. There are calamities one does not contemplate, when one
+thinks of time and change. Death, passing away, even ruin, are all
+the human lot; but one contemplates ruin as brought by kindly ages,
+coming slowly at last, with lichen and ivy and moss, its harsher
+aspects all hidden with green, coming with dignity and in due season.
+Thus our works should pass away; our worst fears contemplated no more
+than this.
+
+But here in a single day, perhaps in a moment with one discharge from
+a battery, all the little things that one family cared for, their
+house, their garden; and the garden paths, and then the village and
+the road through the village, and the old landmarks that the old
+people remembered, and countless treasured things, were all turned
+into rubbish.
+
+And these things that one did not contemplate, have happened for
+hundreds of miles, with such disaster vast plains and hills are
+covered, because of the German war.
+
+Deep wells, old cellars, battered trenches and dug-outs, lie in the
+rubbish and weeds under the intricate wreckage of peace and war. It
+will be a bad place years hence for wanderers lost at night.
+
+When the village went, trenches came; and, in the same storm that had
+crumbled the village, the trenches withered too; shells still thump
+on to the north, but peace and war alike have deserted the village.
+Grass has begun to return over torn earth on edges of trenches.
+Abundant wire rusts away by its twisted stakes of steel. Not a path
+of old, not a lane nor a doorway there, but is barred and cut off by
+wire; and the wire in its turn has been cut by shells and lies in
+ungathered swathes. A pair of wheels moulders amongst weeds, and may
+be of peace or of war, it is too broken down for anyone to say. A
+great bar of iron lies cracked across as though one of the elder
+giants had handled it carelessly. Another mound near by, with an old
+green beam sticking out of it, was also once a house. A trench runs
+by it. A German bomb with its wooden handle, some bottles, a bucket,
+a petrol tin and some bricks and stones, lie in the trench. A young
+elder tree grows amongst them. And over all the ruin and rubbish
+Nature, with all her wealth and luxury, comes back to her old
+inheritance, holding again the land that she held so long, before the
+houses came.
+
+A garden gate of iron has been flung across a wall. Then a deep
+cellar into which a whole house seems to have slanted down. In the
+midst of all this is an orchard. A huge shell has uprooted, but not
+killed, an apple-tree; another apple-tree stands stone dead on the
+edge of a crater: most of the trees are dead. British aeroplanes
+drone over continually. A great gun goes by towards Bapaume, dragged
+by a slow engine with caterpillar wheels. The gun is all blotched
+green and yellow. Four or five men are seated on the huge barrel
+alone.
+
+Dark old steps near the orchard run down into a dug-out, with a
+cartridge-case tied to a piece of wood beside it to beat when the gas
+came. A telephone wire lies listlessly by the opening. A patch of
+Michaelmas daisies, deep mauve and pale mauve, and a bright yellow
+flower beside them, show where a garden used to stand near by. Above
+the dug-out a patch of jagged earth shows in three clear layers under
+the weeds: four inches of grey road metal, imported, for all this
+country is chalk and clay; two inches of flint below it, and under
+that an inch of a bright red stone. We are looking then at a road—a
+road through a village trodden by men and women, and the hooves of
+horses and familiar modern things, a road so buried, so shattered, so
+overgrown, showing by chance an edge in the midst of the wilderness,
+that I could seem rather to have discovered the track of the Dinosaur
+in prehistoric clays than the highway, of a little village that only
+five years ago was full of human faults and joys and songs and tiny
+tears. Down that road before the plans, of the Kaiser began to fumble
+with the earth, down that road—but it is useless to look back, we
+are too far away from five years ago, too far away from thousands of
+ordinary things, that never seemed as though they would ever peer at
+us over chasms of time, out of another age, utterly far off,
+irrevocably removed from our ways and days. They are gone, those
+times, gone like the Dinosaur; gone with bows and arrows and the old
+knightlier days. No splendour marks their sunset where I sit, no
+dignity of houses, or derelict engines of war, ruined all equally are
+scattered dirtily in the mud, and common weeds overpower them; it is
+not ruin but rubbish that covers the ground here and spreads its
+untidy flood for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
+
+A band plays in Arras, to the north and east the shells go thumping
+on.
+
+The very origins of things are in doubt, so much is jumbled together.
+It is as hard to make out just where the trenches ran, and which was
+No-Man’s-Land, as it is to tell the houses from garden and orchard
+and road: the rubbish covers all. It is as though the ancient forces
+of Chaos had come back from the abyss to fight against order and man,
+and Chaos had won. So lies this village of France.
+
+As I left it a rat, with something in its mouth, holding its head
+high, ran right across the village.
+
+
+
+
+The Real Thing
+
+
+Once at manoeuvres as the Prussian Crown Prince charged at the head
+of his regiment, as sabres gleamed, plumes streamed, and hooves
+thundered behind him, he is reported to have said to one that
+galloped near him: “Ah, if only this were the real thing!”
+
+One need not doubt that the report is true. So a young man might feel
+as he led his regiment of cavalry, for the scene would fire the
+blood; all those young men and fine uniforms and good horses, all
+coming on behind, everything streaming that could float on the air,
+everything jingling then which could ever make a sound, a bright sky
+no doubt over the uniforms, a good fresh wind for men and horses to
+gulp; and behind, the clinking and jingling, the long roll of hooves
+thundering. Such a scene might well stir emotions to sigh for the
+splendours of battle.
+
+This is one side of war. Mutilation and death are another; misery,
+cold and dirt; pain, and the intense loneliness of men left behind by
+armies, with much to think of; no hope, and a day or two to live. But
+we understand that glory covers that.
+
+There is yet a third side.
+
+I came to Albert when the fight was far from it: only at night you
+saw any signs of war, when clouds flashed now and then and curious
+rockets peered. Albert robbed of peace was deserted even by war.
+
+I will not say that Albert was devastated or desolate, for these long
+words have different interpretations and may easily be exaggerated. A
+German agent might say to you, “Devastated is rather a strong word,
+and desolate is a matter of opinion.” And so you might never know
+what Albert is like.
+
+I will tell you what I saw.
+
+Albert was a large town. I will not write of all of it.
+
+I sat down near a railway bridge at the edge of the town; I think I
+was near the station; and small houses had stood there with little
+gardens; such as porters and other railway folk would have lived in.
+I sat down on the railway and looked at one of these houses, for it
+had clearly been a house. It was at the back of it that most
+remained, in what must have been a garden. A girder torn up like a
+pack of cards lay on the leg of a table amongst a brick wall by an
+apple-tree.
+
+Lower down in the heap was the frame-work of a large four-poster bed;
+through it all a vine came up quite green and still alive; and at the
+edge of the heap lay a doll’s green pram. Small though the house had
+been there was evidence in that heap of some prosperity in more than
+one generation. For the four-poster bed had been a fine one, good
+work in sound old timber, before the bits in the girder had driven it
+into the wall; and the green pram must have been the dowry of no
+ordinary, doll, but one with the best yellow curls whose blue eyes
+could move. One blue columbine close by mourned alone for the garden.
+
+The wall and the vine and the bed and the girder lay in an orchard,
+and some of the apple-trees were standing yet, though the orchard had
+been terribly wrecked by shell fire. All that still stood were dead.
+Some stood upon the very edge of craters; their leaves and twigs and
+bark had been stripped by one blast in a moment; and they had
+tottered, with stunted, black, gesticulating branches; and so they
+stood to-day.
+
+The curls of a mattress lay on the ground, clipped once from a
+horse’s mane.
+
+After looking for some while across the orchard one suddenly noticed
+that the cathedral had stood on the other side. It was draped, when
+we saw it closer, as with a huge grey cloak, the lead of its roof
+having come down and covered it.
+
+Near the house of that petted doll (as I came to think of it) a road
+ran by on the other side of the railway. Great shells had dropped
+along it with terrible regularity. You could imagine Death striding
+down it with exact five-yard paces, on his own day, claiming his own.
+As I stood on the road something whispered behind me; and I saw,
+stirring round with the wind, in one of those footsteps of Death, a
+double page of a book open at Chapter II: and Chapter II was headed
+with the proverb, “Un Malheur Ne Vient Jamais Seul;” Misfortunes
+never come singly! And on that dreadful road, with shell-holes every
+five yards as far as the eye could see, and flat beyond it the whole
+city in ruin. What harmless girl or old man had been reading that
+dreadful prophecy when the Germans came down upon Albert and involved
+it, and themselves, and that book, all except those two pages, in
+such multiplication of ruin?
+
+Surely, indeed, there is a third side to war: for what had the doll
+done, that used to have a green pram, to deserve to share thus in the
+fall and punishment of an Emperor?
+
+
+
+
+A Garden Of Arras
+
+
+As I walked through Arras from the Spanish gate, gardens flashed as I
+went, one by one, through the houses.
+
+I stepped in over the window-sill of one of the houses, attracted by
+the gleam of a garden dimly beyond: and went through the empty house,
+empty of people, empty of furniture, empty of plaster, and entered
+the garden through an empty doorway.
+
+When I came near it seemed less like a garden. At first it had almost
+seemed to beckon to passers-by in the street, so rare are gardens now
+in this part of France, that it seemed to have more than a garden’s
+share of mystery, all in the silence there at the back of the silent
+house; but when one entered it some of the mystery went, and seemed
+to hide in a further part of the garden amongst wild shrubs and
+innumerable weeds.
+
+British aeroplanes frequently roared over, disturbing the
+congregation of Arras Cathedral a few hundred yards away, who rose
+cawing and wheeled over the garden; for only jackdaws come to Arras
+Cathedral now, besides a few pigeons.
+
+Unkempt beside me a bamboo flourished wildly, having no need of man.
+On the other side of the small wild track that had been the garden
+path the skeletons of hothouses stood, surrounded by nettles; their
+pipes lay all about, shattered and riddled through.
+
+Branches of rose break up through the myriad nettles, but only to be
+seized and choked by columbine. A late moth looks for flowers not
+quite in vain. It hovers on wing-beats that are invisibly swift by
+its lonely autumn flower, then darts away over the desolation which
+is no desolation to a moth: man has destroyed man; nature comes back;
+it is well: that must be the brief philosophy of myriads of tiny
+things whose way of life one seldom considered before; now that man’s
+cities are down, now that ruin and misery confront us whichever way
+we turn, one notices more the small things that are left.
+
+One of the greenhouses is almost all gone, a tumbled mass that might
+be a piece of Babylon, if archæologists should come to study it. But
+it is too sad to study, too untidy to have any interest, and, alas,
+too common: there are hundreds of miles of this.
+
+The other greenhouse, a sad, ungainly skeleton, is possessed by grass
+and weeds. On the raised centre many flower-pots were neatly arranged
+once: they stand in orderly lines, but each separate one is broken:
+none contain flowers any more, but only grass. And the glass of the
+greenhouse lies there in showers, all grey. No one has tidied
+anything up there for years.
+
+A meadow-sweet had come into that greenhouse and dwelt there in that
+abode of fine tropical flowers, and one night an elder tree had
+entered and is now as high as the house, and at the end of the
+greenhouse grass has come in like a wave; for change and disaster are
+far-reaching and are only mirrored here. This desolate garden and its
+ruined house are a part of hundreds of thousands such, or millions.
+Mathematics will give you no picture of what France has suffered. If
+I tell you what one garden is like, one village, one house, one
+cathedral, after the German war has swept by, and if you read my
+words, I may help you perhaps to imagine more easily what France has
+suffered than if I spoke of millions. I speak of one garden in Arras;
+and you might walk from there, south by east for weeks, and find no
+garden that has suffered less.
+
+It is all weeds and elders. An apple-tree rises out of a mass of
+nettles, but it is quite dead. Wild rose-trees show here and there,
+or roses that have ran wild like the cats of No-Man’s-Land: And once
+I saw a rose-bush that had been planted in a pot and still grew
+there, as though it still remembered man, but the flower-pot was
+shattered, like all the pots in that garden, and the rose grew wild
+as any in any hedge.
+
+The ivy alone grows on over a mighty wall, and seems to care not. The
+ivy alone seems not to mourn, but to have added the last four years
+to its growth as though they were ordinary years. That corner of the
+wall alone whispers not of disaster, it only seems to tell of the
+passing of years, which makes the ivy strong, and for which in peace
+as in war there is no cure. All the rest speaks of war, of war that
+comes to gardens, without banners or trumpets or splendour, and roots
+up everything, and turns round and smashes the house, and leaves it
+all desolate, and forgets and goes away. And when the histories of
+the war are written, attacks and counter-attacks and the doom of
+Emperors, who will remember that garden?
+
+Saddest of all, as it seemed to me watching the garden paths, were
+spiders’ webs that had been spun across them, so grey and stout and
+strong, fastened from weed to weed, with the spiders in their midst
+sitting in obvious ownership. You knew then as you looked at those
+webs across all the paths in the garden that any that you might fancy
+walking the small paths still, were but grey ghosts gone from thence,
+no more than dreams, hopes and imaginings, something altogether
+weaker than spiders webs.
+
+And the old wall of the garden that divides it from its neighbour, of
+solid stone and brick, over fifteen feet high, it is that mighty old
+wall that held the romance of the garden. I do not tell the tale of
+that garden of Arras, for that is conjecture, and I only tell what I
+saw, in order that someone perhaps in some far country may know what
+happened in thousands and thousands of gardens because an Emperor
+sighed, and longed for the splendour of war. The tale is but
+conjecture, yet all the romance is there; for picture a wall over
+fifteen feet high built as they built long ago, standing for all
+those ages between two gardens. For would not the temptation arise to
+peer over the wall if a young man heard, perhaps songs, one evening
+the other side? And at first he would have some pretext and
+afterwards none at all, and the pretext would vary wonderfully little
+with the generations, while the ivy went on growing thicker and
+thicker. The thought might come of climbing the wall altogether and
+down the other side, and it might seem too daring and be utterly put
+away. And then one day, some wonderful summer evening, the west all
+red and a new moon in the sky, far voices heard clearly and white
+mists rising, one wonderful summer day, back would come that thought
+to climb the great old wall and go down the other side. Why not go in
+next door from the street, you might say. That would be different,
+that would be calling; that would mean ceremony, black hats, and
+awkward new gloves, constrained talk and little scope for romance. It
+would all be the fault of the wall.
+
+With what diffidence, as the generations passed, would each first
+peep over the wall be undertaken. In some years it would be scaled
+from one side, in some ages from the other. What a barrier that old
+red wall would have seemed! How new the adventure would have seemed
+in each age to those that dared it, and how old to the wall! And in
+all those years the elders never made a door, but kept that huge and
+haughty separation. And the ivy quietly grew greener. And then one
+day a shell came from the east, and, in a moment, without plan or
+diffidence or pretext, tumbled away some yards of the proud old wall,
+and the two gardens were divided no longer: but there was no one to
+walk in them any more.
+
+Wistfully round the edge of the huge breach in the wall, a Michaelmas
+daisy peered into the garden, in whose ruined paths I stood.
+
+
+
+
+After Hell
+
+
+He heard an English voice shouting, “Paiper! Paiper!” No mere
+spelling of the word will give the intonation. It was the voice of
+English towns he heard again. The very voice of London in the
+morning. It seemed like magic, or like some wonderfully vivid dream.
+
+He was only a hundred miles or so from England; it was not very long
+since he had been there; yet what he heard seemed like an enchanted
+dream, because only the day before he had been in the trenches.
+
+They had been twelve days in the trenches and had marched out at
+evening. They had marched five miles and were among tin huts in quite
+a different world. Through the doorways of the huts green grass could
+be seen and the sun was shining on it. It was morning. Everything was
+strangely different. You saw more faces smiling. Men were not so calm
+as they had been during the last twelve days, the last six
+especially: someone was kicking a football at somebody else’s hut and
+there was excitement about it.
+
+Guns were still firing: but they thought of death now as one who
+walked on the other side of the hills, no longer as a neighbour, as
+one who might drop in at any moment, and sometime did, while they
+were taking tea. It was not that they had been afraid of him, but the
+strain of expectancy was over; and that strain being suddenly gone in
+a single night, they all had a need, whether they knew it or not, of
+something to take its place, so the football loomed very large.
+
+It was morning and he had slept long. The guns that grew active at
+dawn had not woke him; in those twelve days they had grown too
+familiar, but he woke wide when he heard the young English soldier
+with a bundle of three-days-old papers under his arm calling “Paiper,
+paiper!”—bringing to that strange camp the voice of the English
+towns. He woke wide at that wonder; and saw the sun shining cheerily,
+on desolation with a tinge of green in it, which even by itself
+rejoiced him on that morning after those twelve days amongst mud,
+looking at mud, surrounded by mud, protected by mud, sharing with mud
+the liability to be suddenly blown high and to come down in a shower
+on other men’s helmets and coats.
+
+He wondered if Dante when he came up from Hell heard anyone calling
+amongst the Verdure, in sunlight, any familiar call such as merchants
+use, some trivial song or cry of his native city.
+
+
+
+
+A Happy Valley
+
+
+“The enemy attacked the Happy Valley.” I read these words in a paper
+at the time of the taking of Albert, for the second time, by our
+troops. And the words brought back Albert to me like a spell, Albert
+at the end of the mighty Bapaume-Albert road, that pathway of Mars
+down which he had stalked so tremendously through his garden, the
+wide waste battlefields of the Somme. The words brought back Albert
+at the end of that road in the sunset and the cathedral seen against
+the west, and the gilded Virgin half cast down, but incapable of
+losing dignity, and evening coming down over the marshes. They
+brought it back like a spell. Like two spells rather, that some
+magician had mixed. Picture some magician of old in his sombre
+wonderful, chamber wishing dreams to transport him far off to
+delectable valleys. He sits him down and writes out a spell on
+parchment, slowly and with effort of aged memory, though he
+remembered it easily once. The shadows of crocodiles and antique gods
+flicker on walls and ceiling from a gusty flame as he writes; and in
+the end he writes the spell out wrongly and mixes up with the valleys
+where he would rest dark bits of the regions of Hell. So one sees
+Albert again and its Happy Valley.
+
+I do not know which the Happy Valley is, for so many little valleys
+run in and out about Albert; and with a little effort of imagination,
+having only seen them full of the ruin of war, one can fancy any of
+them being once named happy. Yet one there is away to the east of
+Albert, which even up to last autumn seemed able to bear this name,
+so secluded it was in that awful garden of Mars; a tiny valley
+running into the wood of Bécourt. A few yards, higher up and all was
+desolation, a little further along a lonely road and you saw Albert
+mourning over irreparable vistas of ruin and wasted fields; but the
+little valley ran into the wood of Bécourt and sheltered there, and
+there you saw scarcely any signs of war. It might almost have been an
+English valley, by the side of an English wood. The soil was the same
+brown clay that you see in the south of England above the downs and
+the chalk; the wood was a hazel wood, such as grow in England,
+thinned a good deal, as English hazels are, but with several tall
+trees still growing; and plants were there and late flowers, such as
+grow in Surrey and Kent. And at the end of the valley, just in the
+shadow of that familiar homely wood, a hundred British officers rest
+for ever.
+
+As the world is to-day perhaps that obscure spot, as fittingly as any,
+might be named the Happy Valley.
+
+
+
+
+In Bethune
+
+
+Under all ruins is history, as every tourist knows. Indeed, the dust
+that gathers above the ruin of cities may be said to be the cover of
+the most wonderful of the picture-books of Time, those secret books
+into which we sometimes peep. We turn no more, perhaps, than the
+corner of a single page in our prying, but we catch a glimpse there
+of things so gorgeous, in the book that we are not meant to see, that
+it is worth while to travel to far countries, whoever can, to see one
+of those books, and where the edges are turned up a little to catch
+sight of those strange winged bulls and mysterious kings and
+lion-headed gods that were not meant for us. And out of the glimpses
+one catches from odd corners of those volumes of Time, where old
+centuries hide, one builds up part by guesses, part by fancy mixed
+with but little knowledge, a tale or theory of how men and women
+lived in unknown ages in the faith of forgotten gods.
+
+Such a people lived in Timgad and left it probably about the time
+that waning Rome began to call home her outposts. Long after the
+citizens left the city stood on that high plateau in Africa, teaching
+shepherd Arabs what Rome had been: even to-day its great arches and
+parts of its temples stand: its paved streets are still grooved
+clearly with the wheel-ruts of chariots, and beaten down on each side
+of the centre by the pairs of horses that drew them two thousand
+years ago. When all the clatter had died away Timgad stood there in
+silence.
+
+At Pompeii, city and citizens ended together. Pompeii did not mourn
+among strangers, a city without a people: but was buried at once,
+closed like an ancient book.
+
+I doubt if anyone knows why its gods deserted Luxor, or Luxor lost
+faith in its gods, or in itself; conquest from over the desert or
+down the Nile, I suppose, or corruption within. Who knows? But one
+day I saw a woman come out from the back of her house and empty a
+basket full of dust and rubbish right into the temple at Luxor, where
+a dark green god is seated, three times the size of a man, buried as
+high as his waist. I suppose that what I saw had been happening off
+and on pretty well every morning for the last four thousand years.
+Safe under the dust that that woman threw, and the women that lived
+before her, Time hid his secrets.
+
+And then I have seen the edges of stones in deserts that might or
+might not have been cities: they had fallen so long that you could
+hardly say.
+
+At all these cities, whether disaster met them, and ruin came
+suddenly on to crowded streets; or whether they passed slowly out of
+fashion, and grew quieter year by year while the jackals drew nearer
+and nearer; at all these cities one can look with interest and not be
+saddened by the faintest sorrow—for anything that happened to such a
+different people so very long ago. Ram-headed gods, although their
+horns be broken and all their worshippers gone; armies whose
+elephants have turned against them; kings whose ancestors have
+eclipsed their faces in heaven and left them helpless against the
+onslaught of the stars; not a tear is given for one of these to-day.
+
+But when in ruins as complete as Pompeii, as desolate as Timgad
+amongst its African hills, you see the remnant of a pack of cards
+lying with what remains of the stock of a draper’s shop; and the
+front part of the shop and the snug room at the back gape side by
+side together in equal, misery, as though there had never been a
+barrier between the counter with its wares and the good mahogany
+table with its decanters; then in the rustling of papers that blow
+with dust along long-desolate floors one hears the whisper of
+Disaster, saying, “See; I have come.” For under plaster shaken down
+by calamity, and red dust that once was bricks, it is our own age
+that is lying; and the little things that lie about the floors are
+relics of the twentieth century. Therefore in the streets of Bethune
+the wistful appeal that is in all things lost far off and utterly
+passed away cries out with an insistence that is never felt in the
+older fallen cities. No doubt to future times the age that lies under
+plaster in Bethune, with thin, bare laths standing over it, will
+appear an age of glory; and yet to thousands that went one day from
+its streets, leaving all manner of small things behind, it may well
+have been an age full of far other promises, no less golden to them,
+no less magical even, though too little to stir the pen of History,
+busy with batteries and imperial dooms. So that to these, whatever
+others may write, the twentieth century will not be the age of
+strategy, but will only seem to have been those fourteen lost quiet
+summers whose fruits lie under the plaster.
+
+That layer of plaster and brick-dust lies on the age that has gone,
+as final, as fatal, as the layer of flints that covers the top of the
+chalk and marks the end of an epoch and some unknown geologic
+catastrophe.
+
+It is only by the little things in Bethune, lying where they were
+left, that one can trace at all what kind of house each was, or guess
+at the people who dwelt in it. It is only by a potato growing where
+Pavement was, and flowering vigorously under a vacant window, that
+one can guess that the battered, house beside it was once a
+fruiterer’s shop, whence the potato rolled away when man fell on evil
+days, and found the street, no longer harsh and unfriendly; but soft
+and fertile like the primal waste, and took root and throve there as
+its forbears throve before it in another continent before the coming
+of man.
+
+Across the street, in the dust of a stricken house, the implements of
+his trade show where a carpenter lived when disaster came so
+suddenly, quite good tools, some still upon shelves, some amongst
+broken things that lie all over the floor. And further along the
+street in which these things are someone has put up a great iron
+shutter that was to protect his shop. It has a graceful border of
+painted irises all the way up each side. It might have been a
+jeweller that would have had such a shutter. The shutter alone
+remains standing straight upright, and the whole shop is gone.
+
+And just here the shaken street ends and all the streets end
+together. The rest is a mound of white stones and pieces of bricks
+with low, leaning walls surrounding it, and the halves of hollow
+houses; and eyeing it round a corner, one old tower of the cathedral,
+as though still gazing over its congregation of houses, a ruined,
+melancholy watcher. Over the bricks lie tracks, but no more streets.
+It is about the middle of the town, a hawk goes over, calling as
+though he flew over the waste, and as though the waste were his. The
+breeze that carries him opens old shutters and flaps them to again.
+Old, useless hinges moan; wall-paper whispers. Three French soldiers
+trying to find their homes walk over the bricks and groundsel.
+
+It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in
+some fabulous future, nor remembered from terrible ages by the aid
+of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of
+folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics
+of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken
+bricks.
+
+
+
+
+In An Old Drawing-Room
+
+
+There was one house with a roof on it in Peronne. And there an
+officer came by moonlight on his way back from leave. He was looking
+for his battalion which had moved and was now somewhere in the
+desolation out in front of Peronne, or else was marching there—no
+one quite knew. Someone said he had seen it marching through
+Tincourt; the R.T.O. said Brie. Those who did not know were always
+ready to help, they made suggestions and even pulled out maps. Why
+should they not? They were giving away no secret, because they did
+not know, and so they followed a soldier’s natural inclination to
+give all the help they could to another soldier. Therefore they
+offered their suggestions like old friends. They had never met
+before, might never meet again; but La France introduces you, and
+five minute acquaintance in a place like Peronne, where things may
+change so profoundly in one night, and where all is so tense by the
+strange background of ruin that little portions of time seem very
+valuable, five minutes there seem quite a long time. And so they are,
+for what may not happen in five minutes any day now in France. Five
+minutes may be a page of history, a chapter even, perhaps a volume.
+Little children with inky fingers years hence may sit for a whole
+hour trying to learn up and remember just what happened during five
+minutes in France some time about now. These are just reflections
+such as pass through the mind in the moonlight among vast ruins and
+are at once forgotten.
+
+Those that knew where the battalion was that the wandering officer
+looked for were not many; these were reserved and spoke like one that
+has a murder on his conscience, not freely and openly: for of one
+thing no one speaks in France, and that is the exact position of a
+unit. One may wave one’s hand vaguely eastwards and say “Over
+there,”, but to name a village and the people that occupy it is to
+offend against the silence that in these days broods over France, the
+solemn hush befitting so vast a tragedy.
+
+And in the end it seemed better to that officer to obey the R.T.O.
+and to go by his train to Brie that left in the morning, and that
+question settled, there remained only food and sleep.
+
+Down in the basement of the big house with a roof there was a
+kitchen, in fact there was everything that a house should have; and
+the more that one saw of simple household things, tables, chairs, the
+fire in the kitchen, pieces of carpet, floors, ceilings, and even
+windows, the more one wondered; it did not seem natural in Peronne.
+
+Picture to yourself a fine drawing-room with high ornamental walls
+and all the air about it of dignity, peace and ease, that were so
+recently gone; only just, as it might have been, stepped through the
+double doorway; skirts, as it were, of ladies only just trailed out
+of sight; and then turn in fancy to that great town streaming with
+moonlight, full of the mystery that moonlight always brings, but
+without the light of it; all black, dark as caverns of earth where no
+light ever came, blacker for the moonlight than if no moon were
+there; sombre, mourning and accursed, each house in the great streets
+sheltering darkness amongst its windowless walls; as though it nursed
+disaster, having no other children left, and would not let the moon
+peer in on its grief or see the monstrous orphan that it fondled.
+
+In the old drawing-room with twenty others, the wandering officer lay
+down to sleep on the floor, and thought of old wars that came to the
+cities of France a long while ago. To just such houses as this, he
+thought, men must have come before and gone on next day to fight in
+other centuries; it seemed to him that it must have been more
+romantic then. Who knows?
+
+He had a bit of carpet to lie on. A few more officers came in in the
+early part of the night, and talked a little and lay down. A few
+candles were stuck on tables here and there. Midnight would have
+struck from the towers had any clock been left to strike in Peronne.
+Still talk went on in low voices here and there. The candles burned
+low and were fewer. Big shadows floated along those old high walls.
+Then the talk ceased and everyone was still: nothing stirred but the
+shadows. An officer muttered in sleep of things far thence, and was
+silent. Far away shells thumped faintly. The shadows, left to
+themselves, went round and round the room, searching in every corner
+for something that was lost. Over walls and ceiling they went and
+could not find it. The last candle was failing. It flared and
+guttered. The shadows raced over the room from corner to corner. Lost,
+and they could not find it. They hurried desperately in those last
+few moments. Great shadows searching for some little thing. In the
+smallest nook they sought for it. Then the last candle died. As the
+flame went up with the smoke from the fallen wick all the great
+shadows turned and mournfully trailed away.
+
+
+
+
+The Homes Of Arras
+
+
+As you come to Arras by the western road, by the red ramparts and the
+Spanish gate, Arras looks like a king. With such a dignity as clings
+to the ancient gateway so might a king be crowned; with such a sweep
+of dull red as the old ramparts show, so might he be robed; but a
+dead king with crowned skull. For the ways of Arras are empty but for
+brown soldiers, and her houses are bare as bones.
+
+Arras sleeps profoundly, roofless, windowless, carpetless; Arras
+sleeps as a skeleton sleeps, with all the dignity of former days
+about it, but the life that stirs in its streets is not the old
+city’s life, the old city is murdered. I came to Arras and went down
+a street, and saw back gardens glinting through the bare ribs of the
+houses. Garden after garden shone, so far as it could, though it was
+in October and after four years of war; but what was left of those
+gardens shining there in the sun was like sad faces trying to smile
+after many disasters.
+
+I came to a great wall that no shell had breached. A cascade of
+scarlet creeper poured over it, as though on the other side some
+serene garden grew, where no disaster came, tended by girls who had
+never heard of war, walking untrodden paths. It was not so. But one’s
+fancy, weary of ruin, readily turns to such scenes wherever facts are
+hidden, though but by a tottering wall, led by a few bright leaves or
+the glimpse of a flower.
+
+But not for any fancy of mine must you picture ruin any more as
+something graced with splendour, or as it were an argosy reaching the
+shores of our day laden with grandeur and dignity out of antiquity.
+Ruin to-day is not covered with ivy, and has no curious architecture
+or strange secrets of history, and is not beautiful or romantic at
+all. It has no tale to tell of old civilizations, not otherwise
+known, told of by few grey stones. Ruin to-day is destruction and
+sorrow and debt and loss, come down untidily upon modern homes and
+cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar
+trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the
+guardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget:
+ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has
+ceased to be still green in our memory. Quite ordinary wardrobes in
+unseemly attitudes gape out from bedrooms whose front walls are gone,
+in houses whose most inner design shows unconcealed to the cold gaze
+of the street. The rooms have neither mystery nor adornment. Burst
+mattresses loll down from bedraggled beds. No one has come to tidy
+them up for years. And roofs have slanted down as low as the first
+floor.
+
+I saw a green door ajar in an upper room: the whole of the front wall
+of the house was gone: the door partly opened oddly on to a little
+staircase, whose steps one could just see, that one wondered whither
+it went. The door seemed to beckon and beckon to some lost room, but
+if one could ever have got there, up through that shattered house,
+and if the steps of that little staircase would bear, so that one
+came to, the room that is hidden away at the top, yet there could
+only be silence and spiders there, and broken plaster and the dust of
+calamity; it is only to memories that the green door beckons; nothing
+remains.
+
+And some day they may come to Arras to see the romance of war, to see
+where the shells struck and to pick up pieces of iron. It is not this
+that is romantic, not Mars, but poor, limping Peace. It is what is
+left that appeals to you, with pathos and infinite charm; little
+desolate gardens that no one has tended for years, wall-paper left in
+forlorn rooms when all else is scattered, old toys buried in rubbish,
+old steps untrodden on inaccessible landings: it is what is left that
+appeals to you, what remains of old peaceful things. The great guns
+throb on, all round is the panoply of war, if panoply be the right
+word for this vast disaster that is known to Arras as innumerable
+separate sorrows; but it is not to this great event that the sympathy
+turns in Arras, nor to its thunder and show, nor the trappings of it,
+guns, lorries, and fragments of shells: it is to the voiceless,
+deserted inanimate things, so greatly wronged, that all the heart
+goes out: floors fallen in festoons, windows that seem to be wailing,
+roofs as though crazed with grief and then petrified in their
+craziness; railings, lamp-posts, sticks, all hit, nothing spared by
+that frenzied iron: the very earth clawed and-torn: it is what is
+left that appeals to you.
+
+As I went from Arras I passed by a grey, gaunt shape, the ghost of a
+railway station standing in the wilderness haunting a waste of weeds,
+and mourning, as it seemed, over rusted railway lines lying idle and
+purposeless as though leading nowhere, as though all roads had
+ceased, and all lands were deserted, and all travellers dead:
+sorrowful and lonely that ghostly shape stood dumb in the desolation
+among houses whose doors were shut and their windows broken. And in
+all that stricken assembly no voice spoke but the sound of iron
+tapping on broken things, which was dumb awhile when the wind
+dropped. The wind rose and it tapped again.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13820 ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Unhappy Far-Off Things, by Lord Dunsany
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Unhappy Far-Off Things
+
+Author: Lord Dunsany
+
+Release Date: October 21, 2004 [EBook #13820]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tom Harris
+
+
+
+
+
+UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS
+
+by Lord Dunsany
+
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+I have chosen a title that shall show that I make no claim for this
+book to be "up-to-date." As the first title indicates, I hoped to
+show, to as many as might to read my words, something of the extent
+of the wrongs that the people of France had suffered. There is no
+such need any longer. The tales, so far as they went, I gather
+together here for the few that seem to read my books in England.
+
+                                                            Dunsany.
+
+
+
+
+
+A Dirge Of Victory (Sonnet)
+
+Lift not thy trumpet, Victory, to the sky,
+  Nor through battalions nor by batteries blow,
+  But over hollows full of old wire go,
+Where among dregs of war the long-dead lie
+With wasted iron that the guns passed by.
+  When they went eastwards like a tide at flow;
+  There blow thy trumpet that the dead may know,
+Who waited for thy coming, Victory.
+
+It is not we that have deserved thy wreath,
+  They waited there among the towering weeds.
+The deep mud burned under the thermite's breath,
+  And winter cracked the bones that no man heeds:
+Hundreds of nights flamed by: the seasons passed.
+And thou last come to them at last, at last!
+
+
+
+
+
+The Cathedral Of Arras
+
+On the great steps of Arras Cathedral I saw a procession, in silence,
+standing still.
+
+They were in orderly and perfect lines, stirring or swaying slightly:
+sometimes they bent their heads, sometimes two leaned together, but
+for the most part they were motionless. It was the time when the
+fashion is just changing and some were newly all in shining yellow,
+while others still wore green.
+
+I went up the steps amongst them, the only human thing, for men and
+women worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have come
+instead; little humble things, all less than four years old, in great
+numbers thronging the steps processionally, and growing in perfect
+rows just where step meets step. They have come to Arras with the
+wind and the rain; which enter the aisles together whenever they
+will, and go wherever man went; they have such a reverent air, the
+young limes on the three flights of steps, that you would say they
+did not know that Arras Cathedral was fallen on evil days, that they
+did not know they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but thought that
+these great walls open to stars and sun were the natural and fitting
+place for the worship of little weeds.
+
+Behind them the shattered houses of Arras seemed to cluster about the
+cathedral as, one might fancy easily, hurt and frightened children,
+so wistful are their gaping windows and old, grey empty gables, so
+melancholy and puzzled. They are more like a little old people come
+upon trouble, gazing at their great elder companion and not knowing
+what to do.
+
+But the facts of Arras are sadder than a poet's most tragic fancies.
+In the western front of Arras Cathedral stand eight pillars rising
+from the ground; above them stood four more. Of the four upper
+pillars the two on the left are gone, swept away by shells from the
+north: and a shell has passed through the neck of one of the two that
+is left, just as a bullet might go through a daffodil's stem.
+
+The left-hand corner of that western wall has been caught from the
+north, by some tremendous shell which has torn the whole corner down
+in a mound of stone: and still the walls have stood.
+
+I went in through the western doorway. All along the nave lay a long
+heap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a little
+trodden path over the grass and weeds. This is all that remained of
+the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may have
+been in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them. It was
+all down but one slender arch that crossed the nave just at the
+transept; it stood out against the sky, and all who saw it wondered
+how it stood.
+
+In the southern aisle panes of green glass, in twisted frame of lead,
+here and there lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple-tree-after a
+hailstorm in spring. The aisles still had their roofs over them which
+those stout old walls held up in spite of all.
+
+Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous. Perhaps
+there was more to bring down there, so the Germans brought it down:
+there may have been a tower there, for all I know, or a spire.
+
+I stood on the heap and looked towards the altar. To my left all was
+ruin. To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.
+The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened,
+partly broken. A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was
+this that had opened the door.
+
+Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something
+made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.
+
+As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate
+sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a
+sad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemed
+to be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been the
+cathedral; perhaps she had once been the Bishop's servant, or the
+wife of one of the vergers; she only remained of all who had been
+there in other days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws. I spoke to
+her. All Arras, she said, was ruined. The great cathedral was ruined,
+her own family were ruined utterly, and she pointed to where the sad
+houses gazed from forlorn dead windows. Absolute ruin, she said; but
+there must be no armistice. No armistice. No. It was necessary that
+there should be no armistice at all. No armistice with Germans.
+
+She passed on, resolute and sad, and the guns boomed on beyond Arras.
+
+A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes' heads on his collar, showed
+me a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was five
+years ago. It was the very chancel before which I was standing. To
+see that photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera that
+took it must have stood where I was standing, only a little lower
+down, under the great heap. Though one knew there had been an altar
+there, and candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of a
+cathedral's interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on that
+weedy heap, in the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast with
+which the mind fumbled.
+
+I walked a little with the French interpreter. We came to a little
+shrine in the southern aisle. It had been all paved with marble, and
+the marble was broken into hundreds of pieces, and someone had
+carefully picked up all the bits, and laid them together on the
+altar.
+
+And this pathetic heap that was gathered of broken bits had drawn
+many to stop and gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they had
+written their names on them: every bit had a name on it, with but a
+touch of irony the Frenchman said, "All that is necessary to bring
+your name to posterity is to write it on one of these stones.", "No,"
+I said, "I will do it by describing all this." And we both laughed.
+
+I have not done it yet: there is more to say of Arras. As I begin the
+tale of ruin and wrong, the man who did it totters. His gaudy power
+begins to stream away like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne will
+be bare, and I shall have but begun to say what I have to say of
+calamity in cathedral and little gardens of Arras.
+
+The winter of the Hohenzollerns will come; sceptre, uniforms, stars
+and courtiers all gone; still the world will not know half of the
+bitter wrongs of Arras. And spring will bring a new time and cover
+the trenches with green, and the pigeons will preen themselves on the
+shattered towers, and the lime-trees along the steps will grow taller
+and brighter, and happier men will sing in the streets untroubled by
+any War Lord; by then, perhaps, I may have told, to such as care to
+read, what such a war did in an ancient town, already romantic when
+romance was young, when war came suddenly without mercy, without
+pity, out of the north and east, on little houses, carved galleries,
+and gardens; churches, cathedrals and the jackdaws' nests.
+
+
+
+
+
+A Good War
+
+Nietsche said, "You have heard that a good cause justifies any war,
+but I say unto you that a good war justifies any cause."
+
+A man was walking alone over a plain so desolate that, if you have
+never seen it, the mere word desolation could never convey to you the
+melancholy surroundings that mourned about this man on his lonely
+walk. Far off a vista of trees followed a cheerless road all dead as
+mourners suddenly stricken dead in some funereal procession. By this
+road he had come; but when he had reached a certain point he turned
+from the road at once, branching away to the left, led by a line of
+bushes that may once have been a lane. For some while his feet had
+rustled through long neglected grass; sometimes he lifted them up to
+step over a telephone wire that lolled over old entanglements and
+bushes; often he came to rusty strands of barbed wire and walked
+through them where they had been cut, perhaps years ago, by huge
+shells; then his feet hissed on through the grass again, dead grass
+that had hissed about his boots all through the afternoon.
+
+Once he sat down to rest on the edge of a crater, weary with such
+walking as he had never seen before; and after he had stayed there a
+little while a cat that seemed to have its home in that wild place
+started suddenly up and leaped away over the weeds. It seemed an
+animal totally wild, and utterly afraid of man.
+
+Grey bare hills surrounded the waste: a partridge called far off:
+evening was drawing in. He rose wearily, and yet with a certain
+fervour, as one that pursues With devotion a lamentable quest.
+Looking round him as he left his resting-place he saw a cabbage or
+two that after some while had come back to what was a field and had
+sprouted on the edge of a shell-hole. A yellowing convolvulus climbed
+up a dead weed. Weeds, grass and tumbled earth were all about him. It
+would be no better when he went on. Still he went on. A flower or two
+peeped up among the weeds. He stood up and looked at the landscape
+and drew no hope from that, the shattered trunk of a stricken tree
+leered near him, white trenches scarred the hillside. He followed an
+old trench through a hedge of elder, passed under more wire, by a
+great rusty shell that had not burst, passed by a dug-out where
+something grey seemed to lie down at the bottom of many steps. Black
+fungi grew near the entrance. He went on and on over shell-holes,
+passing round them where they were deep, stepping into or over the
+small ones. Little burrs clutched at him; he went rustling on, the
+only sound in the waste but the clicking of shattered iron. Now he
+was among nettles. He came by many small unnatural valleys. He passed
+more trenches only guarded by fungi. While it was light he followed
+little paths, marvelling who made them. Once he got into a trench.
+Dandelions leaned across it as though to bar his way, believing man
+to have gone and to have no right to return. Weeds thronged, in
+thousands here. It was the day of the weeds. It was only they that
+seemed to triumph in those fields deserted of man. He passed on down
+the trench and never knew whose trench it once had been. Frightful
+shells had smashed it here and there, and had twisted iron as though
+round gigantic fingers that had twiddled it idly a moment and let it
+drop to lie in the rain for ever. He passed more dug-outs and black
+fungi, watching them; and then he left the trench, going straight on
+over the open: again dead grasses hissed about his feet, sometimes
+small wire sang faintly He passed through a belt of nettles and
+thence to dead grass again. And now the light of the afternoon was
+beginning to dwindle away. He had intended to reach his journey's end
+by daylight, for he was past the time of life when one wanders after
+dark, but he had not contemplated the difficulty of walking over that
+road, or dreamed that lanes he knew could be so foundered and merged,
+in that mournful desolate moor.
+
+Evening was filling fast, still he kept on. It was the time when the
+cornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turn
+grey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit their
+innumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation:
+and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound of
+iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound that
+would haunt the waste for ever.
+
+And evening settled down, a huge grey canvas waiting for sombre
+pictures; a setting for all the dark tales of the world, haunted
+forever a grizzly place was haunted ever, in any century, in any
+land; but not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and
+half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things
+huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions,
+under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was
+villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two
+Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering for
+dominion of the world.
+
+The cold wind blew over the blasted heath and bits of broken iron
+flapped on and on.
+
+And now the traveller hurried, for night was falling, and such a
+night as three witches might have brewed in a cauldron. He went on
+eagerly but with infinite sadness. Over the sky-line strange rockets
+went up from the war, peered oddly over the earth and went down
+again. Very far off a few soldiers lit a little fire of their own.
+The night grew colder; tap, tap, went broken iron.
+
+And at last the traveller stopped in the lonely night and looked
+round him attentively, and appeared to be satisfied that he had come
+within sight of his journey's end, although to ordinary eyes the spot
+to which he had come differed in no way from the rest of the waste.
+
+He went no further, but turned round and round, peering piece by
+piece at that weedy and cratered earth.
+
+He was looking for the village where he was born.
+
+
+
+
+
+The House With Two Storeys
+
+I came again to Croisilles.
+
+I looked for the sunken road that we used to hold in support, with
+its row of little shelters in the bank and the carved oak saints
+above them here and there that had survived the church in Croisilles.
+I could have found it with my eyes shut. With my eyes open I could
+not find it. I did not recognize the lonely metalled road down which
+lorries were rushing for the little lane so full of life, whose
+wheel-ruts were three years old.
+
+As I gazed about me looking for our line, I passed an old French
+civilian looking down at a slight mound of white stone that rose a
+little higher than the road. He was walking about uncertainly, when
+first I noticed him, as though he was not sure where he was. But now
+he stood quite still looking down at the mound.
+
+"Voil� ma maison," he said.
+
+He said no more than that: this astounding remark, this gesture that
+indicated such calamity, were quite simply made. There was nothing
+whatever of theatrical pose that we wrongly associate with the
+French, because they conceal their emotions less secretly than we;
+there were no tragic tones in his voice: only a trace of deep
+affection showed in one of the words he used. He spoke as a woman
+might say of her only child, "Look at _my_ baby."
+
+"Voil� ma maison," he said.
+
+I tried to say in his language what I felt; and after my attempt he
+spoke of his house.
+
+It was very old. Down underneath, he said, it dated from feudal
+times; though I did not quite make out whether all that lay under
+that mound had been so old or whether he only meant the cellars of
+his house. It was a fine high house, he said, as much as two storeys
+high. No one that is familiar with houses of fifty storeys, none even
+that has known palaces, will smile at this old man's efforts to tell
+of his high house, and to make me believe that it rose to two storeys
+high, as we stood together by that sad white mound. He told me that
+his son was killed. And that disaster strangely did not move me so
+much as the white mound that had been a house and had had two
+storeys, for it seems to be common to every French family with whose
+fathers I have chanced to speak in ruined cities or on busy roads of
+France.
+
+He pointed to a huge white mound beyond on the top of which someone
+had stuck a small cross of wood. "The church," he said. And that I
+knew already.
+
+In very inadequate French I tried to comfort him. I told him that
+surely France would build his house again. Perhaps even the allies;
+for I could not believe that we shall have done enough if we merely
+drive the Germans out of France and leave this poor old man still
+wandering homeless. I told him that surely in the future Croisilles
+would stand again.
+
+He took no interest in anything that I said. His house of two storeys
+was down, his son was dead, the little village of Croisilles had gone
+away; he had only one hope from the future. When I had finished
+speaking of the future, he raised a knobbed stick that he carried, up
+to the level of his throat, surely his son's old trench stick, and
+there he let it dangle from a piece of string in the handle, which he
+held against his neck. He watched me shrewdly and attentively
+meanwhile, for I was a stranger and was to be taught something I
+might not know--a thing that it was necessary for all men to learn.
+"Le Kaiser," he said. "Yes;" I said, "the Kaiser." But I pronounced
+the word Kaiser differently from him, and he repeated again "Le
+Kaiser," and watched me closely to be sure that I understood. And
+then he said "Pendu," and made the stick quiver a little as it
+dangled from its string. "Oui," I said, "Pendu."
+
+Did I understand? He was not yet quite sure. It was important that
+this thing should be quite decided between us as we stood on this
+road through what had been Croisilles, where he had lived through
+many sunny years and I had dwelt for a season amongst rats. "Pendu"
+he said. Yes, I agreed.
+
+It was all right. The old man almost smiled.
+
+I offered him a cigarette and we lit two from an apparatus of flint
+and steel and petrol that the old man had in his pocket.
+
+He showed me a photograph of himself and a passport to prove, I
+suppose, that he was not a spy. One could not recognize the likeness,
+for it must have been taken on some happier day, before he had seen
+his house of two storeys lying there by the road. But he was no spy,
+for there were tears in his eyes; and Prussians I think have no tears
+for what we saw across the village of Croisilles.
+
+I spoke of the rebuilding of his house no more, I spoke no more of
+the new Croisilles shining through future years; for these were not
+the things that he saw in the future, and these were not the hopes of
+the poor old man. He had one dark hope of the future, and no others.
+He hoped to see the Kaiser hung for the wrong he had done to
+Croisilles. It was for this hope he lived.
+
+Madame or se�or of whatever far country, who may chance to see these
+words, blame not this old man for the fierce hope he cherished. It
+was the only hope he had. You, Madame, with your garden, your house,
+your church, the village where all know you, you may hope as a
+Christian should, there is wide room for hope in your future. You
+shall see the seasons move over your garden, you shall busy yourself
+with your home, and speak and share with your neighbours innumerable
+small joys, and find consolation and beauty, and at last rest, in and
+around the church whose spire you see from your home. You, se�or,
+with your son perhaps growing up, perhaps wearing already some sword
+that you wore once, you can turn back to your memories or look with
+hope to the future with equal ease.
+
+The man that I met in Croisilles had none of these things at all. He
+had that one hope only.
+
+Do not, I pray you, by your voice or vote, or by any power or
+influence that you have, do anything to take away from this poor old
+Frenchman the only little hope he has left. The more trivial his odd
+hope appears to you compared with your own high hopes that come so
+easily to you amongst all your fields and houses, the more cruel a
+thing must it be to take it from him.
+
+I learned many things in Croisilles, and the last of them is this
+strange one the old man taught me. I turned and shook hands with him
+and said good-bye, for I wished to see again our old front line that
+we used to hold over the hill, now empty, silent at last. "The Boche
+is defeated," I said.
+
+"Vaincu, vaincu," he repeated. And I left him with something almost
+like happiness looking out of his tearful eyes.
+
+
+
+
+
+Bermondsey _versus_ Wurtemburg
+
+The trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceased
+altogether, and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of the ghosts of
+murdered trees, all grey and deserted.
+
+Descending into Albert past trees in their agony we came all at once
+on the houses. You did not see them far off as in other cities; we
+came on them all at once as you come on a corpse in the grass.
+
+We stopped and stood by a house that was covered with plaster marked
+off to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, the
+slates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel.
+Near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway
+bridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as
+though it had gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay one
+of the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there upon
+some flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it had
+been a slender cane that someone had shoved too hard into the earth.
+
+There had been a force abroad in Albert that could do these things,
+an iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical
+contrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a
+moment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal.
+
+When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come down
+upon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped and
+withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and in
+that attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcome
+by disaster.
+
+Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins,
+fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which
+they had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a
+crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London
+shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap
+knife sticking up from a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is long
+out of fashion.
+
+The stale smell of war arose from the desolation.
+
+A British helmet dinted in like an old bowler, but tragic not absurd,
+lay near a barrel and a teapot.
+
+On a wall that rose above a heap of dirty and smashed rafters was
+written in red paint KOMPe I.M.B.K. 184. The red paint had dripped
+down the wall from every letter. Verily we stood upon the scene of
+the murder.
+
+Opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces of
+a pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of
+grapes and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outside
+the door.
+
+Perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. I entered the
+house and looked round.
+
+A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, only
+chipped at the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. There were
+pretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was like
+the age-old dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. A man's waistcoat
+lay on the mud and part of a woman's stays: the waistcoat was black
+and was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to see
+on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these
+days from peace.
+
+A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of a
+corner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was an
+upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a
+hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come
+again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; the
+hand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman's
+dress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, the
+laths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopes
+men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come
+too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway's
+posture that ever a family would come home there again or tread those
+steps once more. And, if in some far country one should hope, who has
+not seen Albert, out of compassion for these poor people of France,
+that where a staircase still remains there may be enough of a house
+to shelter those who called it home again, I will tell one thing
+more: there blew inside that house the same wind that blew outside,
+the wind that wandered free over miles of plains wandered unchecked
+through that house; there was no indoors or outdoors any more.
+
+And on the wall of the room in which I stood, someone had proudly
+written his regiment's name, The 156th Wurtemburgers. It was written
+in chalk; and another man had come and had written two words before
+it and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. And the writing
+remains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silent
+but for the wind and the things that creak as it blows, the only
+message of this deserted house, is this mighty record, this rare line
+of history, ill-written: "Lost by the 156th Wurtemburgers, retaken by
+the Bermondsey Butterflies."
+
+Two men wrote that sentence between them. And, as with Homer, no one
+knows who they were. And; like Homer, their words were epic.
+
+
+
+
+
+On An Old Battle-Field
+
+I entered an old battle-field through a garden gate, a pale green
+gate by the. Bapaume-Arras road. The cheerful green attracted me in
+the deeps of the desolation as an emerald might in a dust-bin. I
+entered through that homely garden gate, it had no hinges, no
+pillars, it lolled on a heap of stone: I came to it from the road;
+this alone was not battle-field; the road alone was made and tended
+and kept; all the rest was battle-field, as far as the eye could see.
+Over a large whitish heap lay a Virginia creeper, turning a dull
+crimson. And the presence of this creeper mourning there in the waste
+showed unmistakably that the heap had been a house. All the living
+things were gone that had called this white heap Home: the father
+would be fighting, somewhere; the children would have fled, if there
+had been time; the dog would have gone with them, or perhaps, if
+there was not time, he served other masters; the cat would have made
+a lair for herself and stalked mice at night through the trenches.
+All the live things that we ever consider were gone; the creeper
+alone remained, the only mourner, clinging to fallen stones that had
+supported it once.
+
+And I knew by its presence here there had been a house. And by the
+texture or composition of the ruin all round I saw that a village had
+stood there. There are calamities one does not contemplate, when one
+thinks of time and change. Death, passing away, even ruin, are all
+the human lot; but one contemplates ruin as brought by kindly ages,
+coming slowly at last, with lichen and ivy and moss, its harsher
+aspects all hidden with green, coming with dignity and in due season.
+Thus our works should pass away; our worst fears contemplated no more
+than this.
+
+But here in a single day, perhaps in a moment with one discharge from
+a battery, all the little things that one family cared for, their
+house, their garden; and the garden paths, and then the village and
+the road through the village, and the old landmarks that the old
+people remembered, and countless treasured things, were all turned
+into rubbish.
+
+And these things that one did not contemplate, have happened for
+hundreds of miles, with such disaster vast plains and hills are
+covered, because of the German war.
+
+Deep wells, old cellars, battered trenches and dug-outs, lie in the
+rubbish and weeds under the intricate wreckage of peace and war. It
+will be a bad place years hence for wanderers lost at night.
+
+When the village went, trenches came; and, in the same storm that had
+crumbled the village, the trenches withered too; shells still thump
+on to the north, but peace and war alike have deserted the village.
+Grass has begun to return over torn earth on edges of trenches.
+Abundant wire rusts away by its twisted stakes of steel. Not a path
+of old, not a lane nor a doorway there, but is barred and cut off by
+wire; and the wire in its turn has been cut by shells and lies in
+ungathered swathes. A pair of wheels moulders amongst weeds, and may
+be of peace or of war, it is too broken down for anyone to say. A
+great bar of iron lies cracked across as though one of the elder
+giants had handled it carelessly. Another mound near by, with an old
+green beam sticking out of it, was also once a house. A trench runs
+by it. A German bomb with its wooden handle, some bottles, a bucket,
+a petrol tin and some bricks and stones, lie in the trench. A young
+elder tree grows amongst them. And over all the ruin and rubbish
+Nature, with all her wealth and luxury, comes back to her old
+inheritance, holding again the land that she held so long, before the
+houses came.
+
+A garden gate of iron has been flung across a wall. Then a deep
+cellar into which a whole house seems to have slanted down. In the
+midst of all this is an orchard. A huge shell has uprooted, but not
+killed, an apple-tree; another apple-tree stands stone dead on the
+edge of a crater: most of the trees are dead. British aeroplanes
+drone over continually. A great gun goes by towards Bapaume, dragged
+by a slow engine with caterpillar wheels. The gun is all blotched
+green and yellow. Four or five men are seated on the huge barrel
+alone.
+
+Dark old steps near the orchard run down into a dug-out, with a
+cartridge-case tied to a piece of wood beside it to beat when the gas
+came. A telephone wire lies listlessly by the opening. A patch of
+Michaelmas daisies, deep mauve and pale mauve, and a bright yellow
+flower beside them, show where a garden used to stand near by. Above
+the dug-out a patch of jagged earth shows in three clear layers under
+the weeds: four inches of grey road metal, imported, for all this
+country is chalk and clay; two inches of flint below it, and under
+that an inch of a bright red stone. We are looking then at a road--a
+road through a village trodden by men and women, and the hooves of
+horses and familiar modern things, a road so buried, so shattered, so
+overgrown, showing by chance an edge in the midst of the wilderness,
+that I could seem rather to have discovered the track of the Dinosaur
+in prehistoric clays than the highway, of a little village that only
+five years ago was full of human faults and joys and songs and tiny
+tears. Down that road before the plans, of the Kaiser began to fumble
+with the earth, down that road--but it is useless to look back, we
+are too far away from five years ago, too far away from thousands of
+ordinary things, that never seemed as though they would ever peer at
+us over chasms of time, out of another age, utterly far off,
+irrevocably removed from our ways and days. They are gone, those
+times, gone like the Dinosaur; gone with bows and arrows and the old
+knightlier days. No splendour marks their sunset where I sit, no
+dignity of houses, or derelict engines of war, mined all equally are
+scattered dirtily in the mud, and common weeds overpower them; it is
+not ruin but rubbish that covers the ground here and spreads its
+untidy flood for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
+
+A band plays in Arras, to the north and east the shells go thumping
+on.
+
+The very origins of things are in doubt, so much is jumbled together.
+It is as hard to make out just where the trenches ran, and which was
+No-Man's-Land, as it is to tell the houses from garden and orchard
+and road: the rubbish covers all. It is as though the ancient forces
+of Chaos had come back from the abyss to fight against order and man,
+and Chaos had won. So lies this village of France.
+
+As I left it a rat, with something in its mouth, holding its head
+high, ran right across the village.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Real Thing
+
+Once at manoeuvres as the Prussian Crown Prince charged at the head
+of his regiment, as sabres gleamed, plumes streamed, and hooves
+thundered behind him, he is reported to have said to one that
+galloped near him: "Ah, if only this were the real thing!"
+
+One need not doubt that the report is true. So a young man might feel
+as he led his regiment of cavalry, for the scene would fire the
+blood; all those young men and fine uniforms and good horses, all
+coming on behind, everything streaming that could float on the air,
+everything jingling then which could ever make a sound, a bright sky
+no doubt over the uniforms, a good fresh wind for men and horses to
+gulp; and behind, the clinking and jingling, the long roll of hooves
+thundering. Such a scene might well stir emotions to sigh for the
+splendours of battle.
+
+This is one side of war. Mutilation and death are another; misery,
+cold and dirt; pain, and the intense loneliness of men left behind by
+armies, with much to think of; no hope, and a day or two to live. But
+we understand that glory covers that.
+
+There is yet a third side.
+
+I came to Albert when the fight was far from it: only at night you
+saw any signs of war, when clouds flashed now and then and curious
+rockets peered. Albert robbed of peace was deserted even by war.
+
+I will not say that Albert was devastated or desolate, for these long
+words have different interpretations and may easily be exaggerated. A
+German agent might say to you, "Devastated is rather a strong word,
+and desolate is a matter of opinion." And so you might never know
+what Albert is like.
+
+I will tell you what I saw.
+
+Albert was a large town. I will not write of all of it.
+
+I sat down near a railway bridge at the edge of the town; I think I
+was near the station; and small houses had stood there with little
+gardens; such as porters and other railway folk would have lived in.
+I sat down on the railway and looked at one of these houses, for it
+had clearly been a house. It was at the back of it that most
+remained, in what must have been a garden. A girder torn up like a
+pack of cards lay on the leg of a table amongst a brick wall by an
+apple-tree.
+
+Lower down in the heap was the frame-work of a large four-poster bed;
+through it all a vine came up quite green and still alive; and at the
+edge of the heap lay a doll's green pram. Small though the house had
+been there was evidence in that heap of some prosperity in more than
+one generation. For the four-poster bed had been a fine one, good
+work in sound old timber, before the bits in the girder had driven it
+into the wall; and the green pram must have been the dowry of no
+ordinary, doll, but one with the best yellow curls whose blue eyes
+could move. One blue columbine close by mourned alone for the garden.
+
+The wall and the vine and the bed and the girder lay in an orchard,
+and some of the apple-trees were standing yet, though the orchard had
+been terribly wrecked by shell fire. All that still stood were dead.
+Some stood upon the very edge of craters; their leaves and twigs and
+bark had been stripped by one blast in a moment; and they had
+tottered, with stunted, black, gesticulating branches; and so they
+stood today.
+
+The curls of a mattress lay on the ground, clipped once from a
+horse's mane.
+
+After looking for some while across the orchard one suddenly noticed
+that the cathedral had stood on the other side. It was draped, when
+we saw it closer, as with a huge grey cloak, the lead of its roof
+having come down and covered it.
+
+Near the house of that petted doll (as I came to think of it) a road
+ran by on the other side of the railway. Great shells had dropped
+along it with terrible regularity. You could imagine Death striding
+down it with exact five-yard paces, on his own day, claiming his own.
+As I stood on the road something whispered behind me; and I saw,
+stirring round with the wind, in one of those footsteps of Death, a
+double page of a book open at Chapter II: and Chapter II was headed
+with the proverb, "Un Malheur Ne Vient Jamais Seul;" Misfortunes
+never come singly! And on that dreadful road, with shell-holes every
+five yards as far as the eye could see, and fiat beyond it the whole
+city in ruin. What harmless girl or old man had been reading that
+dreadful prophecy when the Germans came down upon Albert and involved
+it, and themselves, and that book, all except those two pages, in
+such multiplication of ruin?
+
+Surely, indeed, there is a third side to war: for what had the doll
+done, that used to have a green pram, to deserve to share thus in the
+fall and punishment of an Emperor?
+
+
+
+
+
+A Garden Of Arras
+
+As I walked through Arras from the Spanish gate, gardens flashed as I
+went, one by one, through the houses.
+
+I stepped in over the window-sill of one of the houses, attracted by
+the gleam of a garden dimly beyond: and went through the empty house,
+empty of people, empty of furniture, empty of plaster, and entered
+the garden through an empty doorway.
+
+When I came near it seemed less like a garden. At first it had almost
+seemed to beckon to passers-by in the street, so rare are gardens now
+in this part of France, that it seemed to have more than a garden's
+share of mystery, all in the silence there at the back of the silent
+house; but when one entered it some of the mystery went, and seemed
+to hide in a further part of the garden amongst wild shrubs and
+innumerable weeds.
+
+British aeroplanes frequently roared over, disturbing the
+congregation of Arras Cathedral a few hundred yards away, who rose
+cawing and wheeled over the garden; for only jackdaws come to Arras
+Cathedral now, besides a few pigeons.
+
+Unkempt beside me a bamboo flourished wildly, having no need of man.
+On the other side of the small wild track that had been the garden
+path the skeletons of hothouses stood, surrounded by nettles; their
+pipes lay all about, shattered and riddled through.
+
+Branches of rose break up through the myriad nettles, but only to be
+seized and choked by columbine. A late moth looks for flowers not
+quite in vain. It hovers on wing-beats that are invisibly swift by
+its lonely autumn flower, then darts away over the desolation which
+is no desolation to a moth: man has destroyed man; nature comes back;
+it is well: that must be the brief philosophy of myriads of tiny
+things whose way of life one seldom considered before; now that man's
+cities are down, now that ruin and misery confront us whichever way
+we turn, one notices more the small things that are left.
+
+One of the greenhouses is almost all gone, a tumbled mass that might
+be a piece of Babylon, if arch�ologists should come to study it. But
+it is too sad to study, too untidy to have any interest, and, alas,
+too common: there are hundreds of miles of this.
+
+The other greenhouse, a sad, ungainly skeleton, is possessed by grass
+and weeds. On the raised centre many flower-pots were neatly arranged
+once: they stand in orderly lines, but each separate one is broken:
+none contain flowers any more, but only grass. And the glass of the
+greenhouse lies there in showers, all grey. No one has tidied
+anything up there for years.
+
+A meadow-sweet had come into that greenhouse and dwelt there in that
+abode of fine tropical flowers, and one night an elder tree had
+entered and is now as high as the house, and at the end of the
+greenhouse grass has come in like a wave; for change and disaster are
+far-reaching and are only mirrored here. This desolate garden and its
+mined house are a part of hundreds of thousands such, or millions.
+Mathematics will give you no picture of what France has suffered. If
+I tell you what one garden is like, one village, one house, one
+cathedral, after the German war has swept by, and if you read my
+words, I may help you perhaps to imagine more easily what France has
+suffered than if I spoke of millions. I speak of one garden in Arras;
+and you might walk from there, south by east for weeks, and find no
+garden that has suffered less.
+
+It is all weeds and elders. An apple-tree rises out of a mass of
+nettles, but it is quite dead. Wild rose-trees show here and there,
+or roses that have ran wild like the cats of No-Man's-Land: And once
+I saw a rose-bush that had been planted in a pot and still grew
+there, as though it still remembered man, but the flower-pot was
+shattered, like all the pots in that garden, and the rose grew wild
+as any in any hedge.
+
+The ivy alone grows on over a mighty wall, and seems to care not. The
+ivy alone seems not to mourn, but to have added the last four years
+to its growth as though they were ordinary years. That corner of the
+wall alone whispers not of disaster, it only seems to tell of the
+passing of years, which makes the ivy strong, and for which in peace
+as in war there is no cure. All the rest speaks of war, of war that
+comes to gardens, without banners or trumpets or splendour, and roots
+up everything, and turns round and smashes the house, and leaves it
+all desolate, and forgets and goes away. And when the histories of
+the war are written, attacks and counter-attacks and the doom of
+Emperors, who will remember that garden?
+
+Saddest of all, as it seemed to me watching the garden paths, were
+spiders' webs that had been spun across them, so grey and stout and
+strong, fastened from weed to weed, with the spiders in their midst
+sitting in obvious ownership. You knew then as you looked at those
+webs across all the paths in the garden that any that you might fancy
+walking the small paths still, were but grey ghosts gone from thence,
+no more than dreams, hopes and imaginings, something altogether
+weaker than spiders webs.
+
+And the old wall of the garden that divides it from its neighbour, of
+solid stone and brick, over fifteen feet high, it is that mighty old
+wall that held the romance of the garden. I do not tell the tale of
+that garden of Arras, for that is conjecture, and I only tell what I
+saw, in order that someone perhaps in some far country may know what
+happened in thousands and thousands of gardens because an Emperor
+sighed, and longed for the splendour of war. The tale is but
+conjecture, yet all the romance is there; for picture a wall over
+fifteen feet high built as they built long ago, standing for all
+those ages between two gardens. For would not the temptation arise to
+peer over the wall if a young man heard, perhaps songs, one evening
+the other side? And at first he would have some pretext and
+afterwards none at all, and the pretext would vary wonderfully little
+with the generations, while the ivy went on growing thicker and
+thicker. The thought might come of climbing the wall altogether and
+down the other side, and it might seem too daring and be utterly put
+away. And then one day, some wonderful summer evening, the west all
+red and a new moon in the sky, far voices heard clearly and white
+mists rising, one wonderful summer day, back would come that thought
+to climb the great old wall and go down the other side. Why not go in
+next door from the street, you might say. That would be different,
+that would be calling; that would mean ceremony, black hats, and
+awkward new gloves, constrained talk and little scope for romance. It
+would all be the fault of the wall.
+
+With what diffidence, as the generations passed, would each first
+peep over the wall be undertaken. In some years it would be scaled
+from one side, in some ages from the other. What a barrier that old
+red wall would have seemed! How new the adventure would have seemed
+in each age to those that dared it, and how old to the wall! And in
+all those years the elders never made a door, but kept that huge and
+haughty separation. And the ivy quietly grew greener. And then one
+day a shell came from the east, and, in a moment, without plan or
+diffidence or pretext, tumbled away some yards of the proud old wall,
+and the two gardens were divided no longer: but there was no one to
+walk in them any more.
+
+Wistfully round the edge of the huge breach in the wall, a Michaelmas
+daisy peered into the garden, in whose mined paths I stood.
+
+
+
+
+
+After Hell
+
+He heard an English voice shouting, "Paiper! Paiper!" No mere
+spelling of the word will give the intonation. It was the voice of
+English towns he heard again. The very voice of London in the
+morning. It seemed like magic, or like some wonderfully vivid dream.
+
+He was only a hundred miles or so from England; it was not very long
+since he had been there; yet what he heard seemed like an enchanted
+dream, because only the day before he had been in the trenches.
+
+They had been twelve days in the trenches and had marched out at
+evening. They had marched five miles and were among tin huts in quite
+a different world. Through the doorways of the huts green grass could
+be seen and the sun was shining on it. It was morning. Everything was
+strangely different. You saw more faces smiling. Men were not so calm
+as they had been during the last twelve days, the last six
+especially: someone was kicking a football at somebody else's hut and
+there was excitement about it.
+
+Guns were still firing: but they thought of death now as one who
+walked on the other side of the hills, no longer as a neighbour, as
+one who might drop in at any moment, and sometime did, while they
+were taking tea. It was not that they had been afraid of him, but the
+strain of expectancy was over; and that strain being suddenly gone in
+a single night, they all had a need, whether they knew it or not, of
+something to take its place, so the football loomed very large.
+
+It was morning and he had slept long. The guns that grew active at
+dawn had not woke him; in those twelve days they had grown too
+familiar, but he woke wide when he heard the young English soldier
+with a bundle of three-days-old papers under his arm calling "Paiper,
+paiper!"--bringing to that strange camp the voice of the English
+towns. He woke wide at that wonder; and saw the sun shining cheerily,
+on desolation with a tinge of green in it, which even by itself
+rejoiced him on that morning after those twelve days amongst mud,
+looking at mud, surrounded by mud, protected by mud, sharing with mud
+the liability to be suddenly blown high and to come down in a shower
+on other men's helmets and coats.
+
+He wondered if Dante when he came up from Hell heard anyone calling
+amongst the Verdure, in sunlight, any familiar call such as merchants
+use, some trivial song or cry of his native city.
+
+
+
+
+
+A Happy Valley
+
+"The enemy attacked the Happy Valley." I read these words in a paper
+at the time of the taking of Albert, for the second time, by our
+troops. And the words brought back Albert to me like a spell, Albert
+at the end of the mighty Bapaume-Albert road, that pathway Of Mars
+down which he had stalked so tremendously through his garden, the
+wide waste battlefields of the Somme. The words brought back Albert
+at the end of that road in the sunset and the cathedral seen against
+the west, and the gilded Virgin half cast down, but incapable of
+losing dignity, and evening coming down over the marshes. They
+brought it back like a spell. Like two spells rather, that some
+magician had mixed. Picture some magician of old in his sombre
+wonderful, chamber wishing dreams to transport him far off to
+delectable valleys. He sits him down and writes out a spell on
+parchment, slowly and with effort of aged memory, though he
+remembered it easily once. The shadows of crocodiles and antique gods
+flicker on walls and ceiling from a gusty flame as he writes; and in
+the end he writes the spell out wrongly and mixes up with the valleys
+where he would rest dark bits of the regions of Hell. So one sees
+Albert again and its Happy Valley.
+
+I do not know which the Happy Valley is, for so many little valleys
+run in and out about Albert; and with a little effort of imagination,
+having only seen them full of the ruin of war, one can fancy any of
+them being once named happy. Yet one there is away to the east of
+Albert, which even up to last autumn seemed able to bear this name,
+so secluded it was in that awful garden of Mars; a tiny valley
+running into the wood of B�court. A few yards, higher up and all was
+desolation, a little further along a lonely road and you saw Albert
+mourning over irreparable vistas of ruin and wasted fields; but the
+little valley ran into the wood of B�court and sheltered there, and
+there you saw scarcely any signs of war. It might almost have been an
+English valley, by the side of an English wood. The soil was the same
+brown clay that you see in the south Of England above the downs and
+the chalk; the wood was a hazel wood, such as grow in England,
+thinned a good deal, as English hazels are, but with several tall
+trees still growing; and plants were there and late flowers, such as
+grow in Surrey and Kent. And at the end of the valley, just in the
+shadow of that familiar homely wood, a hundred British officers rest
+for ever.
+
+As the world is today perhaps that obscure spot, as fittingly as any,
+might be named the Happy Valley.
+
+
+
+
+
+In Bethune
+
+Under all ruins is history, as every tourist knows. Indeed, the dust
+that gathers above the ruin of cities may be said to be the cover of
+the most wonderful of the picture-books of Time, those secret books
+into which we sometimes peep. We turn no more, perhaps, than the
+corner of a single page in our prying, but we catch a glimpse there
+of things so gorgeous, in the book that we are not meant to see, that
+it is worth while to travel to far countries, whoever can, to see one
+of those books, and where the edges are turned up a little to catch
+sight of those strange winged bulls and mysterious kings and
+lion-headed gods that were not meant for us. And out of the glimpses,
+one catches from odd comers of those volumes of Time, where old
+centuries hide, one builds up part by guesses, part by fancy mixed
+with but little knowledge, a tale or theory of how men and women
+lived in unknown ages in the faith of forgotten gods.
+
+Such a people lived in Timgad and left it probably about the time
+that waning Rome began to call home her outposts. Long after the
+citizens left the city stood on that high plateau in Africa, teaching
+shepherd Arabs what Rome had been: even to-day its great arches and
+parts of its temples stand: its paved streets are still grooved
+clearly with the wheel-ruts of chariots, and beaten down on each side
+of the centre by the pairs of horses that drew them two thousand
+years ago. When all the clatter had died away Timgad stood there in
+silence.
+
+At Pompeii, city and citizens ended together. Pompeii did not mourn
+among strangers, a city without a people: but was buried at once,
+closed like an ancient book.
+
+I doubt if anyone knows why its gods deserted Luxor, or Luxor lost
+faith in its gods, or in itself; conquest from over the desert or
+down the Nile, I suppose, or corruption within. Who knows? But one
+day I saw a woman come out from the back of her house and empty a
+basket full of dust and rubbish right into the temple at Luxor, where
+a dark green god is seated, three times the size of a man, buried as
+high as his waist. I suppose that what I saw had been happening off
+and on pretty well every morning for the last four thousand years.
+Safe under the dust that that woman threw, and the women that lived
+before her, Time hid his secrets.
+
+And then I have seen the edges of stones in deserts that might or
+might not have been cities: they had fallen so long that you could
+hardly say.
+
+At all these cities, whether disaster met them, and ruin came
+suddenly on to crowded streets; or whether they passed slowly out of
+fashion, and grew quieter year by year while the jackals drew nearer
+and nearer; at all these cities one can look with interest and not be
+saddened by the faintest sorrow--for anything that happened to such a
+different people so very long ago. Ram-headed gods, although their
+horns be broken and all their worshippers gone; armies whose
+elephants have turned against them; kings whose ancestors have
+eclipsed their faces in heaven and left them helpless against the
+onslaught of the stars; not a tear is given for one of these to-day.
+
+But when in ruins as complete as Pompeii, as desolate as Timgad
+amongst its African hills, you see the remnant of a pack of cards
+lying with what remains of the stock of a draper's shop; and the
+front part of the shop and the snug room at the back gape side by
+side together in equal, misery, as though there had never been a
+barrier between the counter with its wares and the good mahogany
+table with its decanters; then in the rustling of papers that blow
+with dust along long-desolate floors one hears the whisper of
+Disaster, saying, "See; I have come." For under plaster shaken down
+by calamity, and red dust that once was bricks, it is our own age
+that is lying; and the little things that lie about the floors are
+relics of the twentieth century. Therefore in the streets of Bethune
+the wistful appeal that is in all things lost far off and utterly
+passed away cries out with an insistence that is never felt in the
+older fallen cities. No doubt to future times the age that lies under
+plaster in Bethune, with thin, bare laths standing over it, will
+appear an age of glory; and yet to thousands that went one day from
+its streets, leaving all manner of small things behind, it may well
+have been an age full of far other promises, no less golden to them,
+no less magical even, though too little to stir the pen of History,
+busy with batteries and imperial dooms. So that to these, whatever
+others may write, the twentieth-century will not be the age of
+strategy, but will only seem to have been those fourteen lost quiet
+summers whose fruits lie under the plaster.
+
+That layer of plaster and brick-dust lies on the age that has gone,
+as final, as fatal, as the layer of flints that covers the top of the
+chalk and marks the end of an epoch and some unknown geologic
+catastrophe.
+
+It is only by the little things in Bethune, lying where they were
+left, that one can trace at all what kind of house each was, or guess
+at the people who dwelt in it. It is only by a potato growing where
+Pavement was, and flowering vigorously under a vacant window, that
+one can guess that the battered, house beside it was once a
+fruiterer's shop, whence the potato rolled away when man fell on evil
+days, and found the street, no longer harsh and unfriendly; but soft
+and fertile like the primal waste, and took root and throve there as
+its forbears throve before it in another continent before the coming
+of man.
+
+Across the street, in the dust of a stricken house, the implements of
+his trade show where a carpenter lived when disaster came so
+suddenly, quite good tools, some still upon shelves, some amongst
+broken things that lie all over the floor. And further along the
+street in which these things are someone has put up a great iron
+shutter that was to protect his shop. It has a graceful border of
+painted, irises all the way up each side. It might have been a
+jeweller that would have had such a shutter. The shutter alone
+remains standing straight upright, and the whole shop is gone.
+
+And just here the shaken street ends and all the streets end
+together. The rest is a mound of white stones and pieces of bricks
+with low, leaning walls surrounding it, and the halves of hollow
+houses; and eyeing it round a comer, one old tower of the cathedral,
+as though still gazing over its congregation of houses, a mined,
+melancholy watcher. Over the bricks lie tracks, but no more streets.
+It is about the middle of the town, a hawk goes over, calling as
+though he flew over the waste, and as though the waste were his. The
+breeze that carries him opens old shutters and flaps them to again.
+Old, useless hinges moan; wall-paper whispers. Three French soldiers
+trying to find their homes walk over the bricks and groundsel.
+
+It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in
+some fabulous future, nor  remembered  from terrible ages by the aid
+of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of
+folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics
+of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken
+bricks.
+
+
+
+
+
+In An Old Drawing-Room
+
+There was one house with a roof on it in Peronne. And there an
+officer came by moonlight on his way back from leave. He was looking
+for his battalion which had moved and was now somewhere in the
+desolation out in front of Peronne, or else was marching there--no
+one quite knew. Someone said he had seen it marching through
+Tincourt; the R.T.O. said Brie. Those who did not know were always
+ready to help, they made suggestions and even pulled out maps. Why
+should they not? They were giving away no secret, because they did
+not know, and so they followed a soldier's natural inclination to
+give all the help they could to another soldier. Therefore they
+offered their suggestions like old friends. They had never met
+before, might never meet again; but La France introduces you, and
+five minute acquaintance in a place like Peronne, where things may
+change so profoundly in one night, and where all is so tense by the
+strange background of ruin that little portions of time seem very
+valuable, five minutes there seem quite a long time. And so they are,
+for what may not happen in five minutes any day now in France. Five
+minutes may be a page of history, a chapter even, perhaps a volume.
+Little children with inky fingers years hence may sit for a whole
+hour trying to learn up and remember just what happened during five
+minutes in France some time about now. These are just reflections
+such as pass through the mind in the moonlight among vast ruins and
+are at once forgotten.
+
+Those that knew where the battalion was that the wandering officer
+looked for were not many; these were reserved and spoke like one that
+has a murder on his conscience, not freely and openly: for of one
+thing no one speaks in France, and that is the exact position of a
+unit. One may wave one's hand vaguely eastwards and say "Over
+there,", but to name a village and the people that  occupy it is to
+offend against the silence that in these days broods over France, the
+solemn hush befitting so vast a tragedy.
+
+And in the end it seemed better to that officer to obey the R.T.O.
+and to go by his train to Brie that left in the morning, and that
+question settled, there remained only food and sleep.
+
+Down in the basement of the big house with a roof there was a
+kitchen, in fact there was everything that a house should have; and
+the more that one saw of simple household things, tables, chairs, the
+fire in the kitchen, pieces of carpet, floors, ceilings, and even
+windows, the more one wondered; it did not seem natural in Peronne.
+
+Picture to yourself a fine drawing-room with high ornamental walls
+and all the air about it of dignity, peace and ease, that were so
+recently gone; only just, as it might have been, stepped through the
+double doorway; skirts, as it were, of ladies only just trailed out
+of sight; and then turn in fancy to that great town streaming with
+moonlight, full of the mystery that moonlight always brings, but
+without the light of it; all black, dark as caverns of earth where no
+light ever came, blacker for the moonlight than if no moon were
+there; sombre, mourning and accursed, each house in the great streets
+sheltering darkness amongst its windowless walls; as though it nursed
+disaster, having no other children left, and would not let the moon
+peer in on its grief or see the monstrous orphan that it fondled.
+
+In the old drawing-room with twenty others, the wandering officer lay
+down to sleep on the floor, and thought of old wars that came to the
+cities of France a long while ago. To just such houses as this, he
+thought, men must have come before and gone on next day to fight in
+other centuries; it seemed to him that it must have been more
+romantic then. Who knows?
+
+He had a bit of carpet to lie on. A few more officers came in in the
+early part of the night, and talked a little and lay down. A few
+candles were stuck on tables here and there. Midnight would have
+struck from the towers had any clock been left to strike in Peronne.
+Still talk went on in low voices here and there. The candles burned
+low and were fewer. Big shadows floated along those old high walls.
+Then the talk ceased and everyone was still: nothing stirred but the
+shadows. An officer muttered in sleep of things far thence, and was
+silent. Far away shells thumped faintly. The shadows, left to
+themselves, went round and round the room, searching in every corner
+for something that was lost. Over walls and ceiling they went and
+could not find it. The last candle was failing. It flared and
+guttered. The shadows raced over the room from comer to corner. Lost,
+and they could not find it. They hurried desperately in those last
+few moments. Great shadows searching for some little thing. In the
+smallest nook they sought for it. Then the last candle died. As the
+flame went up with the smoke from the fallen wick all the great
+shadows turned and mournfully trailed away.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Homes Of Arras
+
+As you come to Arras by the western road, by the red ramparts and the
+Spanish gate, Arras looks like a king. With such a dignity as clings
+to the ancient gateway so might a king be crowned; with such a sweep
+of dull red as the old ramparts show, so might he be robed; but a
+dead king with crowned skull. For the ways of Arras are empty but for
+brown soldiers, and her houses are bare as bones.
+
+Arras sleeps profoundly, roofless, windowless, carpetless; Arras
+sleeps as a skeleton sleeps, with all the dignity of former days
+about it, but the life that stirs in its streets is not the old
+city's life, the old city is murdered. I came to Arras and went down
+a street, and saw back gardens glinting through the bare ribs of the
+houses. Garden after garden shone, so far as it could, though it was
+in October and after four years of war; but what was left of those
+gardens shining there in the sun was like sad faces trying to smile
+after many disasters.
+
+I came to a great wall that no shell had breached. A cascade of
+scarlet creeper poured over it, as though on the other side some
+serene garden grew, where no disaster came, tended by girls who had
+never heard of war, walking untrodden paths. It was not so. But one's
+fancy, weary of ruin, readily turns to such scenes wherever facts are
+hidden, though but by a tottering wall, led by a few bright leaves or
+the glimpse of a flower.
+
+But not for any fancy of mine must you picture ruin any more as
+something graced with splendour, or as it were an argosy reaching the
+shores of our day laden with grandeur and dignity out of antiquity.
+Ruin to-day is not covered with ivy, and has no curious architecture
+or strange secrets of history, and is not beautiful or romantic at
+all. It has no tale to tell of old civilizations, not otherwise
+known, told of by few grey stones. Ruin to-day is destruction and
+sorrow and debt and loss, come down untidily upon modern homes and
+cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar
+trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the
+guardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget:
+ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has
+ceased to be still green in our memory. Quite ordinary wardrobes in
+unseemly attitudes gape out from bedrooms whose front walls are gone,
+in houses whose most inner design shows unconcealed to the cold gaze
+of the street. The rooms have neither mystery nor adornment. Burst
+mattresses loll down from bedraggled beds. No one has come to tidy
+them up for years. And roofs have slanted down as low as the first
+floor.
+
+I saw a green door ajar in an upper room: the whole of the front wall
+of the house was gone: the door partly opened oddly on to a little
+staircase, whose steps one could just see, that one wondered whither
+it went. The door seemed to beckon and beckon to some lost room, but
+if one could ever have got there, up through that shattered house,
+and if the steps of that little staircase would bear, so that one
+came to, the room that is hidden away at the top, yet there could
+only be silence and spiders there, and broken plaster and the dust of
+calamity; it is only to memories that the green door beckons; nothing
+remains.
+
+And some day they may come to Arras to see the romance of war, to see
+where the shells struck and to pick up pieces of iron. It is not this
+that is romantic, not Mars, but poor, limping Peace. It is what is
+left that appeals to you, with pathos and infinite charm; little
+desolate gardens that no one has tended for years, wall-paper left in
+forlorn rooms when all else is Scattered, old toys buried in rubbish,
+old steps untrodden on inaccessible landings: it is what is left that
+appeals to you, what remains of old peaceful things. The great guns
+throb on, all round is the panoply of war, if panoply be the right
+word for this vast disaster that is known to Arras as innumerable
+separate sorrows; but it is not to this great event that-the sympathy
+turns in Arras, nor to its thunder and show, nor the trappings of it,
+guns lorries, and fragments of shells: it is to the voiceless,
+deserted inanimate things, so greatly wronged, that all the heart
+goes out: floors fallen in festoons, windows that seem to be wailing,
+roofs as though crazed with grief and then petrified in their
+craziness; railings, lamp-posts, sticks, all hit, nothing spared by
+that frenzied iron: the very earth clawed and-torn: it is what is
+left that appeals to you.
+
+As I went from Arras I passed by a grey, gaunt shape, the ghost of a
+railway station standing in the wilderness haunting a waste of weeds,
+and mourning, as it seemed, over rusted railway lines lying idle and
+purposeless as though leading nowhere, as though all roads had
+ceased, and all lands were deserted, and all travellers dead:
+sorrowful and lonely that ghostly shape stood dumb in the desolation
+among houses whose doors were shut and their windows broken. And in
+all that stricken assembly no voice spoke but the sound of iron
+tapping on broken things, which was dumb awhile when the wind
+dropped. The wind rose and it tapped again.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Unhappy Far-Off Things, by Lord Dunsany
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Unhappy Far-Off Things, by Lord Dunsany
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Unhappy Far-Off Things
+
+Author: Lord Dunsany
+
+Release Date: October 21, 2004 [EBook #13820]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tom Harris
+
+
+
+
+
+UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS
+
+by Lord Dunsany
+
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+
+Preface
+
+I have chosen a title that shall show that I make no claim for this
+book to be "up-to-date." As the first title indicates, I hoped to
+show, to as many as might to read my words, something of the extent
+of the wrongs that the people of France had suffered. There is no
+such need any longer. The tales, so far as they went, I gather
+together here for the few that seem to read my books in England.
+
+                                                            Dunsany.
+
+
+
+
+
+A Dirge Of Victory (Sonnet)
+
+Lift not thy trumpet, Victory, to the sky,
+  Nor through battalions nor by batteries blow,
+  But over hollows full of old wire go,
+Where among dregs of war the long-dead lie
+With wasted iron that the guns passed by.
+  When they went eastwards like a tide at flow;
+  There blow thy trumpet that the dead may know,
+Who waited for thy coming, Victory.
+
+It is not we that have deserved thy wreath,
+  They waited there among the towering weeds.
+The deep mud burned under the thermite's breath,
+  And winter cracked the bones that no man heeds:
+Hundreds of nights flamed by: the seasons passed.
+And thou last come to them at last, at last!
+
+
+
+
+
+The Cathedral Of Arras
+
+On the great steps of Arras Cathedral I saw a procession, in silence,
+standing still.
+
+They were in orderly and perfect lines, stirring or swaying slightly:
+sometimes they bent their heads, sometimes two leaned together, but
+for the most part they were motionless. It was the time when the
+fashion is just changing and some were newly all in shining yellow,
+while others still wore green.
+
+I went up the steps amongst them, the only human thing, for men and
+women worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have come
+instead; little humble things, all less than four years old, in great
+numbers thronging the steps processionally, and growing in perfect
+rows just where step meets step. They have come to Arras with the
+wind and the rain; which enter the aisles together whenever they
+will, and go wherever man went; they have such a reverent air, the
+young limes on the three flights of steps, that you would say they
+did not know that Arras Cathedral was fallen on evil days, that they
+did not know they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but thought that
+these great walls open to stars and sun were the natural and fitting
+place for the worship of little weeds.
+
+Behind them the shattered houses of Arras seemed to cluster about the
+cathedral as, one might fancy easily, hurt and frightened children,
+so wistful are their gaping windows and old, grey empty gables, so
+melancholy and puzzled. They are more like a little old people come
+upon trouble, gazing at their great elder companion and not knowing
+what to do.
+
+But the facts of Arras are sadder than a poet's most tragic fancies.
+In the western front of Arras Cathedral stand eight pillars rising
+from the ground; above them stood four more. Of the four upper
+pillars the two on the left are gone, swept away by shells from the
+north: and a shell has passed through the neck of one of the two that
+is left, just as a bullet might go through a daffodil's stem.
+
+The left-hand corner of that western wall has been caught from the
+north, by some tremendous shell which has torn the whole corner down
+in a mound of stone: and still the walls have stood.
+
+I went in through the western doorway. All along the nave lay a long
+heap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a little
+trodden path over the grass and weeds. This is all that remained of
+the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may have
+been in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them. It was
+all down but one slender arch that crossed the nave just at the
+transept; it stood out against the sky, and all who saw it wondered
+how it stood.
+
+In the southern aisle panes of green glass, in twisted frame of lead,
+here and there lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple-tree-after a
+hailstorm in spring. The aisles still had their roofs over them which
+those stout old walls held up in spite of all.
+
+Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous. Perhaps
+there was more to bring down there, so the Germans brought it down:
+there may have been a tower there, for all I know, or a spire.
+
+I stood on the heap and looked towards the altar. To my left all was
+ruin. To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.
+The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened,
+partly broken. A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was
+this that had opened the door.
+
+Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something
+made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.
+
+As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate
+sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a
+sad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemed
+to be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been the
+cathedral; perhaps she had once been the Bishop's servant, or the
+wife of one of the vergers; she only remained of all who had been
+there in other days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws. I spoke to
+her. All Arras, she said, was ruined. The great cathedral was ruined,
+her own family were ruined utterly, and she pointed to where the sad
+houses gazed from forlorn dead windows. Absolute ruin, she said; but
+there must be no armistice. No armistice. No. It was necessary that
+there should be no armistice at all. No armistice with Germans.
+
+She passed on, resolute and sad, and the guns boomed on beyond Arras.
+
+A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes' heads on his collar, showed
+me a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was five
+years ago. It was the very chancel before which I was standing. To
+see that photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera that
+took it must have stood where I was standing, only a little lower
+down, under the great heap. Though one knew there had been an altar
+there, and candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of a
+cathedral's interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on that
+weedy heap, in the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast with
+which the mind fumbled.
+
+I walked a little with the French interpreter. We came to a little
+shrine in the southern aisle. It had been all paved with marble, and
+the marble was broken into hundreds of pieces, and someone had
+carefully picked up all the bits, and laid them together on the
+altar.
+
+And this pathetic heap that was gathered of broken bits had drawn
+many to stop and gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they had
+written their names on them: every bit had a name on it, with but a
+touch of irony the Frenchman said, "All that is necessary to bring
+your name to posterity is to write it on one of these stones.", "No,"
+I said, "I will do it by describing all this." And we both laughed.
+
+I have not done it yet: there is more to say of Arras. As I begin the
+tale of ruin and wrong, the man who did it totters. His gaudy power
+begins to stream away like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne will
+be bare, and I shall have but begun to say what I have to say of
+calamity in cathedral and little gardens of Arras.
+
+The winter of the Hohenzollerns will come; sceptre, uniforms, stars
+and courtiers all gone; still the world will not know half of the
+bitter wrongs of Arras. And spring will bring a new time and cover
+the trenches with green, and the pigeons will preen themselves on the
+shattered towers, and the lime-trees along the steps will grow taller
+and brighter, and happier men will sing in the streets untroubled by
+any War Lord; by then, perhaps, I may have told, to such as care to
+read, what such a war did in an ancient town, already romantic when
+romance was young, when war came suddenly without mercy, without
+pity, out of the north and east, on little houses, carved galleries,
+and gardens; churches, cathedrals and the jackdaws' nests.
+
+
+
+
+
+A Good War
+
+Nietsche said, "You have heard that a good cause justifies any war,
+but I say unto you that a good war justifies any cause."
+
+A man was walking alone over a plain so desolate that, if you have
+never seen it, the mere word desolation could never convey to you the
+melancholy surroundings that mourned about this man on his lonely
+walk. Far off a vista of trees followed a cheerless road all dead as
+mourners suddenly stricken dead in some funereal procession. By this
+road he had come; but when he had reached a certain point he turned
+from the road at once, branching away to the left, led by a line of
+bushes that may once have been a lane. For some while his feet had
+rustled through long neglected grass; sometimes he lifted them up to
+step over a telephone wire that lolled over old entanglements and
+bushes; often he came to rusty strands of barbed wire and walked
+through them where they had been cut, perhaps years ago, by huge
+shells; then his feet hissed on through the grass again, dead grass
+that had hissed about his boots all through the afternoon.
+
+Once he sat down to rest on the edge of a crater, weary with such
+walking as he had never seen before; and after he had stayed there a
+little while a cat that seemed to have its home in that wild place
+started suddenly up and leaped away over the weeds. It seemed an
+animal totally wild, and utterly afraid of man.
+
+Grey bare hills surrounded the waste: a partridge called far off:
+evening was drawing in. He rose wearily, and yet with a certain
+fervour, as one that pursues With devotion a lamentable quest.
+Looking round him as he left his resting-place he saw a cabbage or
+two that after some while had come back to what was a field and had
+sprouted on the edge of a shell-hole. A yellowing convolvulus climbed
+up a dead weed. Weeds, grass and tumbled earth were all about him. It
+would be no better when he went on. Still he went on. A flower or two
+peeped up among the weeds. He stood up and looked at the landscape
+and drew no hope from that, the shattered trunk of a stricken tree
+leered near him, white trenches scarred the hillside. He followed an
+old trench through a hedge of elder, passed under more wire, by a
+great rusty shell that had not burst, passed by a dug-out where
+something grey seemed to lie down at the bottom of many steps. Black
+fungi grew near the entrance. He went on and on over shell-holes,
+passing round them where they were deep, stepping into or over the
+small ones. Little burrs clutched at him; he went rustling on, the
+only sound in the waste but the clicking of shattered iron. Now he
+was among nettles. He came by many small unnatural valleys. He passed
+more trenches only guarded by fungi. While it was light he followed
+little paths, marvelling who made them. Once he got into a trench.
+Dandelions leaned across it as though to bar his way, believing man
+to have gone and to have no right to return. Weeds thronged, in
+thousands here. It was the day of the weeds. It was only they that
+seemed to triumph in those fields deserted of man. He passed on down
+the trench and never knew whose trench it once had been. Frightful
+shells had smashed it here and there, and had twisted iron as though
+round gigantic fingers that had twiddled it idly a moment and let it
+drop to lie in the rain for ever. He passed more dug-outs and black
+fungi, watching them; and then he left the trench, going straight on
+over the open: again dead grasses hissed about his feet, sometimes
+small wire sang faintly He passed through a belt of nettles and
+thence to dead grass again. And now the light of the afternoon was
+beginning to dwindle away. He had intended to reach his journey's end
+by daylight, for he was past the time of life when one wanders after
+dark, but he had not contemplated the difficulty of walking over that
+road, or dreamed that lanes he knew could be so foundered and merged,
+in that mournful desolate moor.
+
+Evening was filling fast, still he kept on. It was the time when the
+cornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turn
+grey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit their
+innumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation:
+and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound of
+iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound that
+would haunt the waste for ever.
+
+And evening settled down, a huge grey canvas waiting for sombre
+pictures; a setting for all the dark tales of the world, haunted
+forever a grizzly place was haunted ever, in any century, in any
+land; but not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and
+half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things
+huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions,
+under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was
+villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two
+Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering for
+dominion of the world.
+
+The cold wind blew over the blasted heath and bits of broken iron
+flapped on and on.
+
+And now the traveller hurried, for night was falling, and such a
+night as three witches might have brewed in a cauldron. He went on
+eagerly but with infinite sadness. Over the sky-line strange rockets
+went up from the war, peered oddly over the earth and went down
+again. Very far off a few soldiers lit a little fire of their own.
+The night grew colder; tap, tap, went broken iron.
+
+And at last the traveller stopped in the lonely night and looked
+round him attentively, and appeared to be satisfied that he had come
+within sight of his journey's end, although to ordinary eyes the spot
+to which he had come differed in no way from the rest of the waste.
+
+He went no further, but turned round and round, peering piece by
+piece at that weedy and cratered earth.
+
+He was looking for the village where he was born.
+
+
+
+
+
+The House With Two Storeys
+
+I came again to Croisilles.
+
+I looked for the sunken road that we used to hold in support, with
+its row of little shelters in the bank and the carved oak saints
+above them here and there that had survived the church in Croisilles.
+I could have found it with my eyes shut. With my eyes open I could
+not find it. I did not recognize the lonely metalled road down which
+lorries were rushing for the little lane so full of life, whose
+wheel-ruts were three years old.
+
+As I gazed about me looking for our line, I passed an old French
+civilian looking down at a slight mound of white stone that rose a
+little higher than the road. He was walking about uncertainly, when
+first I noticed him, as though he was not sure where he was. But now
+he stood quite still looking down at the mound.
+
+"Voila ma maison," he said.
+
+He said no more than that: this astounding remark, this gesture that
+indicated such calamity, were quite simply made. There was nothing
+whatever of theatrical pose that we wrongly associate with the
+French, because they conceal their emotions less secretly than we;
+there were no tragic tones in his voice: only a trace of deep
+affection showed in one of the words he used. He spoke as a woman
+might say of her only child, "Look at _my_ baby."
+
+"Voila ma maison," he said.
+
+I tried to say in his language what I felt; and after my attempt he
+spoke of his house.
+
+It was very old. Down underneath, he said, it dated from feudal
+times; though I did not quite make out whether all that lay under
+that mound had been so old or whether he only meant the cellars of
+his house. It was a fine high house, he said, as much as two storeys
+high. No one that is familiar with houses of fifty storeys, none even
+that has known palaces, will smile at this old man's efforts to tell
+of his high house, and to make me believe that it rose to two storeys
+high, as we stood together by that sad white mound. He told me that
+his son was killed. And that disaster strangely did not move me so
+much as the white mound that had been a house and had had two
+storeys, for it seems to be common to every French family with whose
+fathers I have chanced to speak in ruined cities or on busy roads of
+France.
+
+He pointed to a huge white mound beyond on the top of which someone
+had stuck a small cross of wood. "The church," he said. And that I
+knew already.
+
+In very inadequate French I tried to comfort him. I told him that
+surely France would build his house again. Perhaps even the allies;
+for I could not believe that we shall have done enough if we merely
+drive the Germans out of France and leave this poor old man still
+wandering homeless. I told him that surely in the future Croisilles
+would stand again.
+
+He took no interest in anything that I said. His house of two storeys
+was down, his son was dead, the little village of Croisilles had gone
+away; he had only one hope from the future. When I had finished
+speaking of the future, he raised a knobbed stick that he carried, up
+to the level of his throat, surely his son's old trench stick, and
+there he let it dangle from a piece of string in the handle, which he
+held against his neck. He watched me shrewdly and attentively
+meanwhile, for I was a stranger and was to be taught something I
+might not know--a thing that it was necessary for all men to learn.
+"Le Kaiser," he said. "Yes;" I said, "the Kaiser." But I pronounced
+the word Kaiser differently from him, and he repeated again "Le
+Kaiser," and watched me closely to be sure that I understood. And
+then he said "Pendu," and made the stick quiver a little as it
+dangled from its string. "Oui," I said, "Pendu."
+
+Did I understand? He was not yet quite sure. It was important that
+this thing should be quite decided between us as we stood on this
+road through what had been Croisilles, where he had lived through
+many sunny years and I had dwelt for a season amongst rats. "Pendu"
+he said. Yes, I agreed.
+
+It was all right. The old man almost smiled.
+
+I offered him a cigarette and we lit two from an apparatus of flint
+and steel and petrol that the old man had in his pocket.
+
+He showed me a photograph of himself and a passport to prove, I
+suppose, that he was not a spy. One could not recognize the likeness,
+for it must have been taken on some happier day, before he had seen
+his house of two storeys lying there by the road. But he was no spy,
+for there were tears in his eyes; and Prussians I think have no tears
+for what we saw across the village of Croisilles.
+
+I spoke of the rebuilding of his house no more, I spoke no more of
+the new Croisilles shining through future years; for these were not
+the things that he saw in the future, and these were not the hopes of
+the poor old man. He had one dark hope of the future, and no others.
+He hoped to see the Kaiser hung for the wrong he had done to
+Croisilles. It was for this hope he lived.
+
+Madame or senor of whatever far country, who may chance to see these
+words, blame not this old man for the fierce hope he cherished. It
+was the only hope he had. You, Madame, with your garden, your house,
+your church, the village where all know you, you may hope as a
+Christian should, there is wide room for hope in your future. You
+shall see the seasons move over your garden, you shall busy yourself
+with your home, and speak and share with your neighbours innumerable
+small joys, and find consolation and beauty, and at last rest, in and
+around the church whose spire you see from your home. You, senor,
+with your son perhaps growing up, perhaps wearing already some sword
+that you wore once, you can turn back to your memories or look with
+hope to the future with equal ease.
+
+The man that I met in Croisilles had none of these things at all. He
+had that one hope only.
+
+Do not, I pray you, by your voice or vote, or by any power or
+influence that you have, do anything to take away from this poor old
+Frenchman the only little hope he has left. The more trivial his odd
+hope appears to you compared with your own high hopes that come so
+easily to you amongst all your fields and houses, the more cruel a
+thing must it be to take it from him.
+
+I learned many things in Croisilles, and the last of them is this
+strange one the old man taught me. I turned and shook hands with him
+and said good-bye, for I wished to see again our old front line that
+we used to hold over the hill, now empty, silent at last. "The Boche
+is defeated," I said.
+
+"Vaincu, vaincu," he repeated. And I left him with something almost
+like happiness looking out of his tearful eyes.
+
+
+
+
+
+Bermondsey _versus_ Wurtemburg
+
+The trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceased
+altogether, and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of the ghosts of
+murdered trees, all grey and deserted.
+
+Descending into Albert past trees in their agony we came all at once
+on the houses. You did not see them far off as in other cities; we
+came on them all at once as you come on a corpse in the grass.
+
+We stopped and stood by a house that was covered with plaster marked
+off to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, the
+slates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel.
+Near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway
+bridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as
+though it had gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay one
+of the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there upon
+some flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it had
+been a slender cane that someone had shoved too hard into the earth.
+
+There had been a force abroad in Albert that could do these things,
+an iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical
+contrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a
+moment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal.
+
+When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come down
+upon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped and
+withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and in
+that attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcome
+by disaster.
+
+Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins,
+fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which
+they had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a
+crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London
+shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap
+knife sticking up from a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is long
+out of fashion.
+
+The stale smell of war arose from the desolation.
+
+A British helmet dinted in like an old bowler, but tragic not absurd,
+lay near a barrel and a teapot.
+
+On a wall that rose above a heap of dirty and smashed rafters was
+written in red paint KOMPe I.M.B.K. 184. The red paint had dripped
+down the wall from every letter. Verily we stood upon the scene of
+the murder.
+
+Opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces of
+a pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of
+grapes and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outside
+the door.
+
+Perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. I entered the
+house and looked round.
+
+A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, only
+chipped at the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. There were
+pretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was like
+the age-old dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. A man's waistcoat
+lay on the mud and part of a woman's stays: the waistcoat was black
+and was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to see
+on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these
+days from peace.
+
+A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of a
+corner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was an
+upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a
+hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come
+again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; the
+hand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman's
+dress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, the
+laths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopes
+men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come
+too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway's
+posture that ever a family would come home there again or tread those
+steps once more. And, if in some far country one should hope, who has
+not seen Albert, out of compassion for these poor people of France,
+that where a staircase still remains there may be enough of a house
+to shelter those who called it home again, I will tell one thing
+more: there blew inside that house the same wind that blew outside,
+the wind that wandered free over miles of plains wandered unchecked
+through that house; there was no indoors or outdoors any more.
+
+And on the wall of the room in which I stood, someone had proudly
+written his regiment's name, The 156th Wurtemburgers. It was written
+in chalk; and another man had come and had written two words before
+it and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. And the writing
+remains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silent
+but for the wind and the things that creak as it blows, the only
+message of this deserted house, is this mighty record, this rare line
+of history, ill-written: "Lost by the 156th Wurtemburgers, retaken by
+the Bermondsey Butterflies."
+
+Two men wrote that sentence between them. And, as with Homer, no one
+knows who they were. And; like Homer, their words were epic.
+
+
+
+
+
+On An Old Battle-Field
+
+I entered an old battle-field through a garden gate, a pale green
+gate by the. Bapaume-Arras road. The cheerful green attracted me in
+the deeps of the desolation as an emerald might in a dust-bin. I
+entered through that homely garden gate, it had no hinges, no
+pillars, it lolled on a heap of stone: I came to it from the road;
+this alone was not battle-field; the road alone was made and tended
+and kept; all the rest was battle-field, as far as the eye could see.
+Over a large whitish heap lay a Virginia creeper, turning a dull
+crimson. And the presence of this creeper mourning there in the waste
+showed unmistakably that the heap had been a house. All the living
+things were gone that had called this white heap Home: the father
+would be fighting, somewhere; the children would have fled, if there
+had been time; the dog would have gone with them, or perhaps, if
+there was not time, he served other masters; the cat would have made
+a lair for herself and stalked mice at night through the trenches.
+All the live things that we ever consider were gone; the creeper
+alone remained, the only mourner, clinging to fallen stones that had
+supported it once.
+
+And I knew by its presence here there had been a house. And by the
+texture or composition of the ruin all round I saw that a village had
+stood there. There are calamities one does not contemplate, when one
+thinks of time and change. Death, passing away, even ruin, are all
+the human lot; but one contemplates ruin as brought by kindly ages,
+coming slowly at last, with lichen and ivy and moss, its harsher
+aspects all hidden with green, coming with dignity and in due season.
+Thus our works should pass away; our worst fears contemplated no more
+than this.
+
+But here in a single day, perhaps in a moment with one discharge from
+a battery, all the little things that one family cared for, their
+house, their garden; and the garden paths, and then the village and
+the road through the village, and the old landmarks that the old
+people remembered, and countless treasured things, were all turned
+into rubbish.
+
+And these things that one did not contemplate, have happened for
+hundreds of miles, with such disaster vast plains and hills are
+covered, because of the German war.
+
+Deep wells, old cellars, battered trenches and dug-outs, lie in the
+rubbish and weeds under the intricate wreckage of peace and war. It
+will be a bad place years hence for wanderers lost at night.
+
+When the village went, trenches came; and, in the same storm that had
+crumbled the village, the trenches withered too; shells still thump
+on to the north, but peace and war alike have deserted the village.
+Grass has begun to return over torn earth on edges of trenches.
+Abundant wire rusts away by its twisted stakes of steel. Not a path
+of old, not a lane nor a doorway there, but is barred and cut off by
+wire; and the wire in its turn has been cut by shells and lies in
+ungathered swathes. A pair of wheels moulders amongst weeds, and may
+be of peace or of war, it is too broken down for anyone to say. A
+great bar of iron lies cracked across as though one of the elder
+giants had handled it carelessly. Another mound near by, with an old
+green beam sticking out of it, was also once a house. A trench runs
+by it. A German bomb with its wooden handle, some bottles, a bucket,
+a petrol tin and some bricks and stones, lie in the trench. A young
+elder tree grows amongst them. And over all the ruin and rubbish
+Nature, with all her wealth and luxury, comes back to her old
+inheritance, holding again the land that she held so long, before the
+houses came.
+
+A garden gate of iron has been flung across a wall. Then a deep
+cellar into which a whole house seems to have slanted down. In the
+midst of all this is an orchard. A huge shell has uprooted, but not
+killed, an apple-tree; another apple-tree stands stone dead on the
+edge of a crater: most of the trees are dead. British aeroplanes
+drone over continually. A great gun goes by towards Bapaume, dragged
+by a slow engine with caterpillar wheels. The gun is all blotched
+green and yellow. Four or five men are seated on the huge barrel
+alone.
+
+Dark old steps near the orchard run down into a dug-out, with a
+cartridge-case tied to a piece of wood beside it to beat when the gas
+came. A telephone wire lies listlessly by the opening. A patch of
+Michaelmas daisies, deep mauve and pale mauve, and a bright yellow
+flower beside them, show where a garden used to stand near by. Above
+the dug-out a patch of jagged earth shows in three clear layers under
+the weeds: four inches of grey road metal, imported, for all this
+country is chalk and clay; two inches of flint below it, and under
+that an inch of a bright red stone. We are looking then at a road--a
+road through a village trodden by men and women, and the hooves of
+horses and familiar modern things, a road so buried, so shattered, so
+overgrown, showing by chance an edge in the midst of the wilderness,
+that I could seem rather to have discovered the track of the Dinosaur
+in prehistoric clays than the highway, of a little village that only
+five years ago was full of human faults and joys and songs and tiny
+tears. Down that road before the plans, of the Kaiser began to fumble
+with the earth, down that road--but it is useless to look back, we
+are too far away from five years ago, too far away from thousands of
+ordinary things, that never seemed as though they would ever peer at
+us over chasms of time, out of another age, utterly far off,
+irrevocably removed from our ways and days. They are gone, those
+times, gone like the Dinosaur; gone with bows and arrows and the old
+knightlier days. No splendour marks their sunset where I sit, no
+dignity of houses, or derelict engines of war, mined all equally are
+scattered dirtily in the mud, and common weeds overpower them; it is
+not ruin but rubbish that covers the ground here and spreads its
+untidy flood for hundreds and hundreds of miles.
+
+A band plays in Arras, to the north and east the shells go thumping
+on.
+
+The very origins of things are in doubt, so much is jumbled together.
+It is as hard to make out just where the trenches ran, and which was
+No-Man's-Land, as it is to tell the houses from garden and orchard
+and road: the rubbish covers all. It is as though the ancient forces
+of Chaos had come back from the abyss to fight against order and man,
+and Chaos had won. So lies this village of France.
+
+As I left it a rat, with something in its mouth, holding its head
+high, ran right across the village.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Real Thing
+
+Once at manoeuvres as the Prussian Crown Prince charged at the head
+of his regiment, as sabres gleamed, plumes streamed, and hooves
+thundered behind him, he is reported to have said to one that
+galloped near him: "Ah, if only this were the real thing!"
+
+One need not doubt that the report is true. So a young man might feel
+as he led his regiment of cavalry, for the scene would fire the
+blood; all those young men and fine uniforms and good horses, all
+coming on behind, everything streaming that could float on the air,
+everything jingling then which could ever make a sound, a bright sky
+no doubt over the uniforms, a good fresh wind for men and horses to
+gulp; and behind, the clinking and jingling, the long roll of hooves
+thundering. Such a scene might well stir emotions to sigh for the
+splendours of battle.
+
+This is one side of war. Mutilation and death are another; misery,
+cold and dirt; pain, and the intense loneliness of men left behind by
+armies, with much to think of; no hope, and a day or two to live. But
+we understand that glory covers that.
+
+There is yet a third side.
+
+I came to Albert when the fight was far from it: only at night you
+saw any signs of war, when clouds flashed now and then and curious
+rockets peered. Albert robbed of peace was deserted even by war.
+
+I will not say that Albert was devastated or desolate, for these long
+words have different interpretations and may easily be exaggerated. A
+German agent might say to you, "Devastated is rather a strong word,
+and desolate is a matter of opinion." And so you might never know
+what Albert is like.
+
+I will tell you what I saw.
+
+Albert was a large town. I will not write of all of it.
+
+I sat down near a railway bridge at the edge of the town; I think I
+was near the station; and small houses had stood there with little
+gardens; such as porters and other railway folk would have lived in.
+I sat down on the railway and looked at one of these houses, for it
+had clearly been a house. It was at the back of it that most
+remained, in what must have been a garden. A girder torn up like a
+pack of cards lay on the leg of a table amongst a brick wall by an
+apple-tree.
+
+Lower down in the heap was the frame-work of a large four-poster bed;
+through it all a vine came up quite green and still alive; and at the
+edge of the heap lay a doll's green pram. Small though the house had
+been there was evidence in that heap of some prosperity in more than
+one generation. For the four-poster bed had been a fine one, good
+work in sound old timber, before the bits in the girder had driven it
+into the wall; and the green pram must have been the dowry of no
+ordinary, doll, but one with the best yellow curls whose blue eyes
+could move. One blue columbine close by mourned alone for the garden.
+
+The wall and the vine and the bed and the girder lay in an orchard,
+and some of the apple-trees were standing yet, though the orchard had
+been terribly wrecked by shell fire. All that still stood were dead.
+Some stood upon the very edge of craters; their leaves and twigs and
+bark had been stripped by one blast in a moment; and they had
+tottered, with stunted, black, gesticulating branches; and so they
+stood today.
+
+The curls of a mattress lay on the ground, clipped once from a
+horse's mane.
+
+After looking for some while across the orchard one suddenly noticed
+that the cathedral had stood on the other side. It was draped, when
+we saw it closer, as with a huge grey cloak, the lead of its roof
+having come down and covered it.
+
+Near the house of that petted doll (as I came to think of it) a road
+ran by on the other side of the railway. Great shells had dropped
+along it with terrible regularity. You could imagine Death striding
+down it with exact five-yard paces, on his own day, claiming his own.
+As I stood on the road something whispered behind me; and I saw,
+stirring round with the wind, in one of those footsteps of Death, a
+double page of a book open at Chapter II: and Chapter II was headed
+with the proverb, "Un Malheur Ne Vient Jamais Seul;" Misfortunes
+never come singly! And on that dreadful road, with shell-holes every
+five yards as far as the eye could see, and fiat beyond it the whole
+city in ruin. What harmless girl or old man had been reading that
+dreadful prophecy when the Germans came down upon Albert and involved
+it, and themselves, and that book, all except those two pages, in
+such multiplication of ruin?
+
+Surely, indeed, there is a third side to war: for what had the doll
+done, that used to have a green pram, to deserve to share thus in the
+fall and punishment of an Emperor?
+
+
+
+
+
+A Garden Of Arras
+
+As I walked through Arras from the Spanish gate, gardens flashed as I
+went, one by one, through the houses.
+
+I stepped in over the window-sill of one of the houses, attracted by
+the gleam of a garden dimly beyond: and went through the empty house,
+empty of people, empty of furniture, empty of plaster, and entered
+the garden through an empty doorway.
+
+When I came near it seemed less like a garden. At first it had almost
+seemed to beckon to passers-by in the street, so rare are gardens now
+in this part of France, that it seemed to have more than a garden's
+share of mystery, all in the silence there at the back of the silent
+house; but when one entered it some of the mystery went, and seemed
+to hide in a further part of the garden amongst wild shrubs and
+innumerable weeds.
+
+British aeroplanes frequently roared over, disturbing the
+congregation of Arras Cathedral a few hundred yards away, who rose
+cawing and wheeled over the garden; for only jackdaws come to Arras
+Cathedral now, besides a few pigeons.
+
+Unkempt beside me a bamboo flourished wildly, having no need of man.
+On the other side of the small wild track that had been the garden
+path the skeletons of hothouses stood, surrounded by nettles; their
+pipes lay all about, shattered and riddled through.
+
+Branches of rose break up through the myriad nettles, but only to be
+seized and choked by columbine. A late moth looks for flowers not
+quite in vain. It hovers on wing-beats that are invisibly swift by
+its lonely autumn flower, then darts away over the desolation which
+is no desolation to a moth: man has destroyed man; nature comes back;
+it is well: that must be the brief philosophy of myriads of tiny
+things whose way of life one seldom considered before; now that man's
+cities are down, now that ruin and misery confront us whichever way
+we turn, one notices more the small things that are left.
+
+One of the greenhouses is almost all gone, a tumbled mass that might
+be a piece of Babylon, if archaeologists should come to study it. But
+it is too sad to study, too untidy to have any interest, and, alas,
+too common: there are hundreds of miles of this.
+
+The other greenhouse, a sad, ungainly skeleton, is possessed by grass
+and weeds. On the raised centre many flower-pots were neatly arranged
+once: they stand in orderly lines, but each separate one is broken:
+none contain flowers any more, but only grass. And the glass of the
+greenhouse lies there in showers, all grey. No one has tidied
+anything up there for years.
+
+A meadow-sweet had come into that greenhouse and dwelt there in that
+abode of fine tropical flowers, and one night an elder tree had
+entered and is now as high as the house, and at the end of the
+greenhouse grass has come in like a wave; for change and disaster are
+far-reaching and are only mirrored here. This desolate garden and its
+mined house are a part of hundreds of thousands such, or millions.
+Mathematics will give you no picture of what France has suffered. If
+I tell you what one garden is like, one village, one house, one
+cathedral, after the German war has swept by, and if you read my
+words, I may help you perhaps to imagine more easily what France has
+suffered than if I spoke of millions. I speak of one garden in Arras;
+and you might walk from there, south by east for weeks, and find no
+garden that has suffered less.
+
+It is all weeds and elders. An apple-tree rises out of a mass of
+nettles, but it is quite dead. Wild rose-trees show here and there,
+or roses that have ran wild like the cats of No-Man's-Land: And once
+I saw a rose-bush that had been planted in a pot and still grew
+there, as though it still remembered man, but the flower-pot was
+shattered, like all the pots in that garden, and the rose grew wild
+as any in any hedge.
+
+The ivy alone grows on over a mighty wall, and seems to care not. The
+ivy alone seems not to mourn, but to have added the last four years
+to its growth as though they were ordinary years. That corner of the
+wall alone whispers not of disaster, it only seems to tell of the
+passing of years, which makes the ivy strong, and for which in peace
+as in war there is no cure. All the rest speaks of war, of war that
+comes to gardens, without banners or trumpets or splendour, and roots
+up everything, and turns round and smashes the house, and leaves it
+all desolate, and forgets and goes away. And when the histories of
+the war are written, attacks and counter-attacks and the doom of
+Emperors, who will remember that garden?
+
+Saddest of all, as it seemed to me watching the garden paths, were
+spiders' webs that had been spun across them, so grey and stout and
+strong, fastened from weed to weed, with the spiders in their midst
+sitting in obvious ownership. You knew then as you looked at those
+webs across all the paths in the garden that any that you might fancy
+walking the small paths still, were but grey ghosts gone from thence,
+no more than dreams, hopes and imaginings, something altogether
+weaker than spiders webs.
+
+And the old wall of the garden that divides it from its neighbour, of
+solid stone and brick, over fifteen feet high, it is that mighty old
+wall that held the romance of the garden. I do not tell the tale of
+that garden of Arras, for that is conjecture, and I only tell what I
+saw, in order that someone perhaps in some far country may know what
+happened in thousands and thousands of gardens because an Emperor
+sighed, and longed for the splendour of war. The tale is but
+conjecture, yet all the romance is there; for picture a wall over
+fifteen feet high built as they built long ago, standing for all
+those ages between two gardens. For would not the temptation arise to
+peer over the wall if a young man heard, perhaps songs, one evening
+the other side? And at first he would have some pretext and
+afterwards none at all, and the pretext would vary wonderfully little
+with the generations, while the ivy went on growing thicker and
+thicker. The thought might come of climbing the wall altogether and
+down the other side, and it might seem too daring and be utterly put
+away. And then one day, some wonderful summer evening, the west all
+red and a new moon in the sky, far voices heard clearly and white
+mists rising, one wonderful summer day, back would come that thought
+to climb the great old wall and go down the other side. Why not go in
+next door from the street, you might say. That would be different,
+that would be calling; that would mean ceremony, black hats, and
+awkward new gloves, constrained talk and little scope for romance. It
+would all be the fault of the wall.
+
+With what diffidence, as the generations passed, would each first
+peep over the wall be undertaken. In some years it would be scaled
+from one side, in some ages from the other. What a barrier that old
+red wall would have seemed! How new the adventure would have seemed
+in each age to those that dared it, and how old to the wall! And in
+all those years the elders never made a door, but kept that huge and
+haughty separation. And the ivy quietly grew greener. And then one
+day a shell came from the east, and, in a moment, without plan or
+diffidence or pretext, tumbled away some yards of the proud old wall,
+and the two gardens were divided no longer: but there was no one to
+walk in them any more.
+
+Wistfully round the edge of the huge breach in the wall, a Michaelmas
+daisy peered into the garden, in whose mined paths I stood.
+
+
+
+
+
+After Hell
+
+He heard an English voice shouting, "Paiper! Paiper!" No mere
+spelling of the word will give the intonation. It was the voice of
+English towns he heard again. The very voice of London in the
+morning. It seemed like magic, or like some wonderfully vivid dream.
+
+He was only a hundred miles or so from England; it was not very long
+since he had been there; yet what he heard seemed like an enchanted
+dream, because only the day before he had been in the trenches.
+
+They had been twelve days in the trenches and had marched out at
+evening. They had marched five miles and were among tin huts in quite
+a different world. Through the doorways of the huts green grass could
+be seen and the sun was shining on it. It was morning. Everything was
+strangely different. You saw more faces smiling. Men were not so calm
+as they had been during the last twelve days, the last six
+especially: someone was kicking a football at somebody else's hut and
+there was excitement about it.
+
+Guns were still firing: but they thought of death now as one who
+walked on the other side of the hills, no longer as a neighbour, as
+one who might drop in at any moment, and sometime did, while they
+were taking tea. It was not that they had been afraid of him, but the
+strain of expectancy was over; and that strain being suddenly gone in
+a single night, they all had a need, whether they knew it or not, of
+something to take its place, so the football loomed very large.
+
+It was morning and he had slept long. The guns that grew active at
+dawn had not woke him; in those twelve days they had grown too
+familiar, but he woke wide when he heard the young English soldier
+with a bundle of three-days-old papers under his arm calling "Paiper,
+paiper!"--bringing to that strange camp the voice of the English
+towns. He woke wide at that wonder; and saw the sun shining cheerily,
+on desolation with a tinge of green in it, which even by itself
+rejoiced him on that morning after those twelve days amongst mud,
+looking at mud, surrounded by mud, protected by mud, sharing with mud
+the liability to be suddenly blown high and to come down in a shower
+on other men's helmets and coats.
+
+He wondered if Dante when he came up from Hell heard anyone calling
+amongst the Verdure, in sunlight, any familiar call such as merchants
+use, some trivial song or cry of his native city.
+
+
+
+
+
+A Happy Valley
+
+"The enemy attacked the Happy Valley." I read these words in a paper
+at the time of the taking of Albert, for the second time, by our
+troops. And the words brought back Albert to me like a spell, Albert
+at the end of the mighty Bapaume-Albert road, that pathway Of Mars
+down which he had stalked so tremendously through his garden, the
+wide waste battlefields of the Somme. The words brought back Albert
+at the end of that road in the sunset and the cathedral seen against
+the west, and the gilded Virgin half cast down, but incapable of
+losing dignity, and evening coming down over the marshes. They
+brought it back like a spell. Like two spells rather, that some
+magician had mixed. Picture some magician of old in his sombre
+wonderful, chamber wishing dreams to transport him far off to
+delectable valleys. He sits him down and writes out a spell on
+parchment, slowly and with effort of aged memory, though he
+remembered it easily once. The shadows of crocodiles and antique gods
+flicker on walls and ceiling from a gusty flame as he writes; and in
+the end he writes the spell out wrongly and mixes up with the valleys
+where he would rest dark bits of the regions of Hell. So one sees
+Albert again and its Happy Valley.
+
+I do not know which the Happy Valley is, for so many little valleys
+run in and out about Albert; and with a little effort of imagination,
+having only seen them full of the ruin of war, one can fancy any of
+them being once named happy. Yet one there is away to the east of
+Albert, which even up to last autumn seemed able to bear this name,
+so secluded it was in that awful garden of Mars; a tiny valley
+running into the wood of Becourt. A few yards, higher up and all was
+desolation, a little further along a lonely road and you saw Albert
+mourning over irreparable vistas of ruin and wasted fields; but the
+little valley ran into the wood of Becourt and sheltered there, and
+there you saw scarcely any signs of war. It might almost have been an
+English valley, by the side of an English wood. The soil was the same
+brown clay that you see in the south Of England above the downs and
+the chalk; the wood was a hazel wood, such as grow in England,
+thinned a good deal, as English hazels are, but with several tall
+trees still growing; and plants were there and late flowers, such as
+grow in Surrey and Kent. And at the end of the valley, just in the
+shadow of that familiar homely wood, a hundred British officers rest
+for ever.
+
+As the world is today perhaps that obscure spot, as fittingly as any,
+might be named the Happy Valley.
+
+
+
+
+
+In Bethune
+
+Under all ruins is history, as every tourist knows. Indeed, the dust
+that gathers above the ruin of cities may be said to be the cover of
+the most wonderful of the picture-books of Time, those secret books
+into which we sometimes peep. We turn no more, perhaps, than the
+corner of a single page in our prying, but we catch a glimpse there
+of things so gorgeous, in the book that we are not meant to see, that
+it is worth while to travel to far countries, whoever can, to see one
+of those books, and where the edges are turned up a little to catch
+sight of those strange winged bulls and mysterious kings and
+lion-headed gods that were not meant for us. And out of the glimpses,
+one catches from odd comers of those volumes of Time, where old
+centuries hide, one builds up part by guesses, part by fancy mixed
+with but little knowledge, a tale or theory of how men and women
+lived in unknown ages in the faith of forgotten gods.
+
+Such a people lived in Timgad and left it probably about the time
+that waning Rome began to call home her outposts. Long after the
+citizens left the city stood on that high plateau in Africa, teaching
+shepherd Arabs what Rome had been: even to-day its great arches and
+parts of its temples stand: its paved streets are still grooved
+clearly with the wheel-ruts of chariots, and beaten down on each side
+of the centre by the pairs of horses that drew them two thousand
+years ago. When all the clatter had died away Timgad stood there in
+silence.
+
+At Pompeii, city and citizens ended together. Pompeii did not mourn
+among strangers, a city without a people: but was buried at once,
+closed like an ancient book.
+
+I doubt if anyone knows why its gods deserted Luxor, or Luxor lost
+faith in its gods, or in itself; conquest from over the desert or
+down the Nile, I suppose, or corruption within. Who knows? But one
+day I saw a woman come out from the back of her house and empty a
+basket full of dust and rubbish right into the temple at Luxor, where
+a dark green god is seated, three times the size of a man, buried as
+high as his waist. I suppose that what I saw had been happening off
+and on pretty well every morning for the last four thousand years.
+Safe under the dust that that woman threw, and the women that lived
+before her, Time hid his secrets.
+
+And then I have seen the edges of stones in deserts that might or
+might not have been cities: they had fallen so long that you could
+hardly say.
+
+At all these cities, whether disaster met them, and ruin came
+suddenly on to crowded streets; or whether they passed slowly out of
+fashion, and grew quieter year by year while the jackals drew nearer
+and nearer; at all these cities one can look with interest and not be
+saddened by the faintest sorrow--for anything that happened to such a
+different people so very long ago. Ram-headed gods, although their
+horns be broken and all their worshippers gone; armies whose
+elephants have turned against them; kings whose ancestors have
+eclipsed their faces in heaven and left them helpless against the
+onslaught of the stars; not a tear is given for one of these to-day.
+
+But when in ruins as complete as Pompeii, as desolate as Timgad
+amongst its African hills, you see the remnant of a pack of cards
+lying with what remains of the stock of a draper's shop; and the
+front part of the shop and the snug room at the back gape side by
+side together in equal, misery, as though there had never been a
+barrier between the counter with its wares and the good mahogany
+table with its decanters; then in the rustling of papers that blow
+with dust along long-desolate floors one hears the whisper of
+Disaster, saying, "See; I have come." For under plaster shaken down
+by calamity, and red dust that once was bricks, it is our own age
+that is lying; and the little things that lie about the floors are
+relics of the twentieth century. Therefore in the streets of Bethune
+the wistful appeal that is in all things lost far off and utterly
+passed away cries out with an insistence that is never felt in the
+older fallen cities. No doubt to future times the age that lies under
+plaster in Bethune, with thin, bare laths standing over it, will
+appear an age of glory; and yet to thousands that went one day from
+its streets, leaving all manner of small things behind, it may well
+have been an age full of far other promises, no less golden to them,
+no less magical even, though too little to stir the pen of History,
+busy with batteries and imperial dooms. So that to these, whatever
+others may write, the twentieth-century will not be the age of
+strategy, but will only seem to have been those fourteen lost quiet
+summers whose fruits lie under the plaster.
+
+That layer of plaster and brick-dust lies on the age that has gone,
+as final, as fatal, as the layer of flints that covers the top of the
+chalk and marks the end of an epoch and some unknown geologic
+catastrophe.
+
+It is only by the little things in Bethune, lying where they were
+left, that one can trace at all what kind of house each was, or guess
+at the people who dwelt in it. It is only by a potato growing where
+Pavement was, and flowering vigorously under a vacant window, that
+one can guess that the battered, house beside it was once a
+fruiterer's shop, whence the potato rolled away when man fell on evil
+days, and found the street, no longer harsh and unfriendly; but soft
+and fertile like the primal waste, and took root and throve there as
+its forbears throve before it in another continent before the coming
+of man.
+
+Across the street, in the dust of a stricken house, the implements of
+his trade show where a carpenter lived when disaster came so
+suddenly, quite good tools, some still upon shelves, some amongst
+broken things that lie all over the floor. And further along the
+street in which these things are someone has put up a great iron
+shutter that was to protect his shop. It has a graceful border of
+painted, irises all the way up each side. It might have been a
+jeweller that would have had such a shutter. The shutter alone
+remains standing straight upright, and the whole shop is gone.
+
+And just here the shaken street ends and all the streets end
+together. The rest is a mound of white stones and pieces of bricks
+with low, leaning walls surrounding it, and the halves of hollow
+houses; and eyeing it round a comer, one old tower of the cathedral,
+as though still gazing over its congregation of houses, a mined,
+melancholy watcher. Over the bricks lie tracks, but no more streets.
+It is about the middle of the town, a hawk goes over, calling as
+though he flew over the waste, and as though the waste were his. The
+breeze that carries him opens old shutters and flaps them to again.
+Old, useless hinges moan; wall-paper whispers. Three French soldiers
+trying to find their homes walk over the bricks and groundsel.
+
+It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in
+some fabulous future, nor  remembered  from terrible ages by the aid
+of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of
+folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics
+of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken
+bricks.
+
+
+
+
+
+In An Old Drawing-Room
+
+There was one house with a roof on it in Peronne. And there an
+officer came by moonlight on his way back from leave. He was looking
+for his battalion which had moved and was now somewhere in the
+desolation out in front of Peronne, or else was marching there--no
+one quite knew. Someone said he had seen it marching through
+Tincourt; the R.T.O. said Brie. Those who did not know were always
+ready to help, they made suggestions and even pulled out maps. Why
+should they not? They were giving away no secret, because they did
+not know, and so they followed a soldier's natural inclination to
+give all the help they could to another soldier. Therefore they
+offered their suggestions like old friends. They had never met
+before, might never meet again; but La France introduces you, and
+five minute acquaintance in a place like Peronne, where things may
+change so profoundly in one night, and where all is so tense by the
+strange background of ruin that little portions of time seem very
+valuable, five minutes there seem quite a long time. And so they are,
+for what may not happen in five minutes any day now in France. Five
+minutes may be a page of history, a chapter even, perhaps a volume.
+Little children with inky fingers years hence may sit for a whole
+hour trying to learn up and remember just what happened during five
+minutes in France some time about now. These are just reflections
+such as pass through the mind in the moonlight among vast ruins and
+are at once forgotten.
+
+Those that knew where the battalion was that the wandering officer
+looked for were not many; these were reserved and spoke like one that
+has a murder on his conscience, not freely and openly: for of one
+thing no one speaks in France, and that is the exact position of a
+unit. One may wave one's hand vaguely eastwards and say "Over
+there,", but to name a village and the people that  occupy it is to
+offend against the silence that in these days broods over France, the
+solemn hush befitting so vast a tragedy.
+
+And in the end it seemed better to that officer to obey the R.T.O.
+and to go by his train to Brie that left in the morning, and that
+question settled, there remained only food and sleep.
+
+Down in the basement of the big house with a roof there was a
+kitchen, in fact there was everything that a house should have; and
+the more that one saw of simple household things, tables, chairs, the
+fire in the kitchen, pieces of carpet, floors, ceilings, and even
+windows, the more one wondered; it did not seem natural in Peronne.
+
+Picture to yourself a fine drawing-room with high ornamental walls
+and all the air about it of dignity, peace and ease, that were so
+recently gone; only just, as it might have been, stepped through the
+double doorway; skirts, as it were, of ladies only just trailed out
+of sight; and then turn in fancy to that great town streaming with
+moonlight, full of the mystery that moonlight always brings, but
+without the light of it; all black, dark as caverns of earth where no
+light ever came, blacker for the moonlight than if no moon were
+there; sombre, mourning and accursed, each house in the great streets
+sheltering darkness amongst its windowless walls; as though it nursed
+disaster, having no other children left, and would not let the moon
+peer in on its grief or see the monstrous orphan that it fondled.
+
+In the old drawing-room with twenty others, the wandering officer lay
+down to sleep on the floor, and thought of old wars that came to the
+cities of France a long while ago. To just such houses as this, he
+thought, men must have come before and gone on next day to fight in
+other centuries; it seemed to him that it must have been more
+romantic then. Who knows?
+
+He had a bit of carpet to lie on. A few more officers came in in the
+early part of the night, and talked a little and lay down. A few
+candles were stuck on tables here and there. Midnight would have
+struck from the towers had any clock been left to strike in Peronne.
+Still talk went on in low voices here and there. The candles burned
+low and were fewer. Big shadows floated along those old high walls.
+Then the talk ceased and everyone was still: nothing stirred but the
+shadows. An officer muttered in sleep of things far thence, and was
+silent. Far away shells thumped faintly. The shadows, left to
+themselves, went round and round the room, searching in every corner
+for something that was lost. Over walls and ceiling they went and
+could not find it. The last candle was failing. It flared and
+guttered. The shadows raced over the room from comer to corner. Lost,
+and they could not find it. They hurried desperately in those last
+few moments. Great shadows searching for some little thing. In the
+smallest nook they sought for it. Then the last candle died. As the
+flame went up with the smoke from the fallen wick all the great
+shadows turned and mournfully trailed away.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Homes Of Arras
+
+As you come to Arras by the western road, by the red ramparts and the
+Spanish gate, Arras looks like a king. With such a dignity as clings
+to the ancient gateway so might a king be crowned; with such a sweep
+of dull red as the old ramparts show, so might he be robed; but a
+dead king with crowned skull. For the ways of Arras are empty but for
+brown soldiers, and her houses are bare as bones.
+
+Arras sleeps profoundly, roofless, windowless, carpetless; Arras
+sleeps as a skeleton sleeps, with all the dignity of former days
+about it, but the life that stirs in its streets is not the old
+city's life, the old city is murdered. I came to Arras and went down
+a street, and saw back gardens glinting through the bare ribs of the
+houses. Garden after garden shone, so far as it could, though it was
+in October and after four years of war; but what was left of those
+gardens shining there in the sun was like sad faces trying to smile
+after many disasters.
+
+I came to a great wall that no shell had breached. A cascade of
+scarlet creeper poured over it, as though on the other side some
+serene garden grew, where no disaster came, tended by girls who had
+never heard of war, walking untrodden paths. It was not so. But one's
+fancy, weary of ruin, readily turns to such scenes wherever facts are
+hidden, though but by a tottering wall, led by a few bright leaves or
+the glimpse of a flower.
+
+But not for any fancy of mine must you picture ruin any more as
+something graced with splendour, or as it were an argosy reaching the
+shores of our day laden with grandeur and dignity out of antiquity.
+Ruin to-day is not covered with ivy, and has no curious architecture
+or strange secrets of history, and is not beautiful or romantic at
+all. It has no tale to tell of old civilizations, not otherwise
+known, told of by few grey stones. Ruin to-day is destruction and
+sorrow and debt and loss, come down untidily upon modern homes and
+cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar
+trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the
+guardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget:
+ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has
+ceased to be still green in our memory. Quite ordinary wardrobes in
+unseemly attitudes gape out from bedrooms whose front walls are gone,
+in houses whose most inner design shows unconcealed to the cold gaze
+of the street. The rooms have neither mystery nor adornment. Burst
+mattresses loll down from bedraggled beds. No one has come to tidy
+them up for years. And roofs have slanted down as low as the first
+floor.
+
+I saw a green door ajar in an upper room: the whole of the front wall
+of the house was gone: the door partly opened oddly on to a little
+staircase, whose steps one could just see, that one wondered whither
+it went. The door seemed to beckon and beckon to some lost room, but
+if one could ever have got there, up through that shattered house,
+and if the steps of that little staircase would bear, so that one
+came to, the room that is hidden away at the top, yet there could
+only be silence and spiders there, and broken plaster and the dust of
+calamity; it is only to memories that the green door beckons; nothing
+remains.
+
+And some day they may come to Arras to see the romance of war, to see
+where the shells struck and to pick up pieces of iron. It is not this
+that is romantic, not Mars, but poor, limping Peace. It is what is
+left that appeals to you, with pathos and infinite charm; little
+desolate gardens that no one has tended for years, wall-paper left in
+forlorn rooms when all else is Scattered, old toys buried in rubbish,
+old steps untrodden on inaccessible landings: it is what is left that
+appeals to you, what remains of old peaceful things. The great guns
+throb on, all round is the panoply of war, if panoply be the right
+word for this vast disaster that is known to Arras as innumerable
+separate sorrows; but it is not to this great event that-the sympathy
+turns in Arras, nor to its thunder and show, nor the trappings of it,
+guns lorries, and fragments of shells: it is to the voiceless,
+deserted inanimate things, so greatly wronged, that all the heart
+goes out: floors fallen in festoons, windows that seem to be wailing,
+roofs as though crazed with grief and then petrified in their
+craziness; railings, lamp-posts, sticks, all hit, nothing spared by
+that frenzied iron: the very earth clawed and-torn: it is what is
+left that appeals to you.
+
+As I went from Arras I passed by a grey, gaunt shape, the ghost of a
+railway station standing in the wilderness haunting a waste of weeds,
+and mourning, as it seemed, over rusted railway lines lying idle and
+purposeless as though leading nowhere, as though all roads had
+ceased, and all lands were deserted, and all travellers dead:
+sorrowful and lonely that ghostly shape stood dumb in the desolation
+among houses whose doors were shut and their windows broken. And in
+all that stricken assembly no voice spoke but the sound of iron
+tapping on broken things, which was dumb awhile when the wind
+dropped. The wind rose and it tapped again.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Unhappy Far-Off Things, by Lord Dunsany
+
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