UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS by Lord Dunsany 1916 Preface I have chosen a title that shall show that I make no claim for thisbook to be "up-to-date. " As the first title indicates, I hoped toshow, to as many as might to read my words, something of the extentof the wrongs that the people of France had suffered. There is nosuch need any longer. The tales, so far as they went, I gathertogether 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 lieWith 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, butfor the most part they were motionless. It was the time when thefashion 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 andwomen worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have comeinstead; little humble things, all less than four years old, in greatnumbers thronging the steps processionally, and growing in perfectrows just where step meets step. They have come to Arras with thewind and the rain; which enter the aisles together whenever theywill, and go wherever man went; they have such a reverent air, theyoung limes on the three flights of steps, that you would say theydid not know that Arras Cathedral was fallen on evil days, that theydid not know they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but thought thatthese great walls open to stars and sun were the natural and fittingplace for the worship of little weeds. Behind them the shattered houses of Arras seemed to cluster about thecathedral as, one might fancy easily, hurt and frightened children, so wistful are their gaping windows and old, grey empty gables, somelancholy and puzzled. They are more like a little old people comeupon trouble, gazing at their great elder companion and not knowingwhat 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 risingfrom the ground; above them stood four more. Of the four upperpillars the two on the left are gone, swept away by shells from thenorth: and a shell has passed through the neck of one of the two thatis left, just as a bullet might go through a daffodil's stem. The left-hand corner of that western wall has been caught from thenorth, by some tremendous shell which has torn the whole corner downin a mound of stone: and still the walls have stood. I went in through the western doorway. All along the nave lay a longheap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a littletrodden path over the grass and weeds. This is all that remained ofthe roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may havebeen in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them. It wasall down but one slender arch that crossed the nave just at thetransept; it stood out against the sky, and all who saw it wonderedhow 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 ahailstorm in spring. The aisles still had their roofs over them whichthose stout old walls held up in spite of all. Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous. Perhapsthere 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 wasruin. 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 wasthis that had opened the door. Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood somethingmade of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ. As I looked at these things there passed through the desolatesanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, asad old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemedto be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been thecathedral; perhaps she had once been the Bishop's servant, or thewife of one of the vergers; she only remained of all who had beenthere in other days, she and the pigeons and jackdaws. I spoke toher. All Arras, she said, was ruined. The great cathedral was ruined, her own family were ruined utterly, and she pointed to where the sadhouses gazed from forlorn dead windows. Absolute ruin, she said; butthere must be no armistice. No armistice. No. It was necessary thatthere 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, showedme a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was fiveyears ago. It was the very chancel before which I was standing. Tosee that photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera thattook it must have stood where I was standing, only a little lowerdown, under the great heap. Though one knew there had been an altarthere, and candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of acathedral's interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on thatweedy heap, in the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast withwhich the mind fumbled. I walked a little with the French interpreter. We came to a littleshrine in the southern aisle. It had been all paved with marble, andthe marble was broken into hundreds of pieces, and someone hadcarefully picked up all the bits, and laid them together on thealtar. And this pathetic heap that was gathered of broken bits had drawnmany to stop and gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they hadwritten their names on them: every bit had a name on it, with but atouch of irony the Frenchman said, "All that is necessary to bringyour 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 thetale of ruin and wrong, the man who did it totters. His gaudy powerbegins to stream away like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne willbe bare, and I shall have but begun to say what I have to say ofcalamity in cathedral and little gardens of Arras. The winter of the Hohenzollerns will come; sceptre, uniforms, starsand courtiers all gone; still the world will not know half of thebitter wrongs of Arras. And spring will bring a new time and coverthe trenches with green, and the pigeons will preen themselves on theshattered towers, and the lime-trees along the steps will grow tallerand brighter, and happier men will sing in the streets untroubled byany War Lord; by then, perhaps, I may have told, to such as care toread, what such a war did in an ancient town, already romantic whenromance was young, when war came suddenly without mercy, withoutpity, 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 havenever seen it, the mere word desolation could never convey to you themelancholy surroundings that mourned about this man on his lonelywalk. Far off a vista of trees followed a cheerless road all dead asmourners suddenly stricken dead in some funereal procession. By thisroad he had come; but when he had reached a certain point he turnedfrom the road at once, branching away to the left, led by a line ofbushes that may once have been a lane. For some while his feet hadrustled through long neglected grass; sometimes he lifted them up tostep over a telephone wire that lolled over old entanglements andbushes; often he came to rusty strands of barbed wire and walkedthrough them where they had been cut, perhaps years ago, by hugeshells; then his feet hissed on through the grass again, dead grassthat had hissed about his boots all through the afternoon. Once he sat down to rest on the edge of a crater, weary with suchwalking as he had never seen before; and after he had stayed there alittle while a cat that seemed to have its home in that wild placestarted suddenly up and leaped away over the weeds. It seemed ananimal 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 certainfervour, as one that pursues With devotion a lamentable quest. Looking round him as he left his resting-place he saw a cabbage ortwo that after some while had come back to what was a field and hadsprouted on the edge of a shell-hole. A yellowing convolvulus climbedup a dead weed. Weeds, grass and tumbled earth were all about him. Itwould be no better when he went on. Still he went on. A flower or twopeeped up among the weeds. He stood up and looked at the landscapeand drew no hope from that, the shattered trunk of a stricken treeleered near him, white trenches scarred the hillside. He followed anold trench through a hedge of elder, passed under more wire, by agreat rusty shell that had not burst, passed by a dug-out wheresomething grey seemed to lie down at the bottom of many steps. Blackfungi grew near the entrance. He went on and on over shell-holes, passing round them where they were deep, stepping into or over thesmall ones. Little burrs clutched at him; he went rustling on, theonly sound in the waste but the clicking of shattered iron. Now hewas among nettles. He came by many small unnatural valleys. He passedmore trenches only guarded by fungi. While it was light he followedlittle paths, marvelling who made them. Once he got into a trench. Dandelions leaned across it as though to bar his way, believing manto have gone and to have no right to return. Weeds thronged, inthousands here. It was the day of the weeds. It was only they thatseemed to triumph in those fields deserted of man. He passed on downthe trench and never knew whose trench it once had been. Frightfulshells had smashed it here and there, and had twisted iron as thoughround gigantic fingers that had twiddled it idly a moment and let itdrop to lie in the rain for ever. He passed more dug-outs and blackfungi, watching them; and then he left the trench, going straight onover the open: again dead grasses hissed about his feet, sometimessmall wire sang faintly He passed through a belt of nettles andthence to dead grass again. And now the light of the afternoon wasbeginning to dwindle away. He had intended to reach his journey's endby daylight, for he was past the time of life when one wanders afterdark, but he had not contemplated the difficulty of walking over thatroad, 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 thecornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turngrey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit theirinnumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation:and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound ofiron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound thatwould haunt the waste for ever. And evening settled down, a huge grey canvas waiting for sombrepictures; a setting for all the dark tales of the world, hauntedforever a grizzly place was haunted ever, in any century, in anyland; but not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves andhalf-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by thingshuger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions, under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once wasvillages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of twoEmperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering fordominion of the world. The cold wind blew over the blasted heath and bits of broken ironflapped on and on. And now the traveller hurried, for night was falling, and such anight as three witches might have brewed in a cauldron. He went oneagerly but with infinite sadness. Over the sky-line strange rocketswent up from the war, peered oddly over the earth and went downagain. 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 lookedround him attentively, and appeared to be satisfied that he had comewithin sight of his journey's end, although to ordinary eyes the spotto 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 bypiece 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, withits row of little shelters in the bank and the carved oak saintsabove 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 couldnot find it. I did not recognize the lonely metalled road down whichlorries were rushing for the little lane so full of life, whosewheel-ruts were three years old. As I gazed about me looking for our line, I passed an old Frenchcivilian looking down at a slight mound of white stone that rose alittle higher than the road. He was walking about uncertainly, whenfirst I noticed him, as though he was not sure where he was. But nowhe stood quite still looking down at the mound. "Voilà ma maison, " he said. He said no more than that: this astounding remark, this gesture thatindicated such calamity, were quite simply made. There was nothingwhatever of theatrical pose that we wrongly associate with theFrench, because they conceal their emotions less secretly than we;there were no tragic tones in his voice: only a trace of deepaffection showed in one of the words he used. He spoke as a womanmight 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 hespoke of his house. It was very old. Down underneath, he said, it dated from feudaltimes; though I did not quite make out whether all that lay underthat mound had been so old or whether he only meant the cellars ofhis house. It was a fine high house, he said, as much as two storeyshigh. No one that is familiar with houses of fifty storeys, none eventhat has known palaces, will smile at this old man's efforts to tellof his high house, and to make me believe that it rose to two storeyshigh, as we stood together by that sad white mound. He told me thathis son was killed. And that disaster strangely did not move me somuch as the white mound that had been a house and had had twostoreys, for it seems to be common to every French family with whosefathers I have chanced to speak in ruined cities or on busy roads ofFrance. He pointed to a huge white mound beyond on the top of which someonehad stuck a small cross of wood. "The church, " he said. And that Iknew already. In very inadequate French I tried to comfort him. I told him thatsurely France would build his house again. Perhaps even the allies;for I could not believe that we shall have done enough if we merelydrive the Germans out of France and leave this poor old man stillwandering homeless. I told him that surely in the future Croisilleswould stand again. He took no interest in anything that I said. His house of two storeyswas down, his son was dead, the little village of Croisilles had goneaway; he had only one hope from the future. When I had finishedspeaking of the future, he raised a knobbed stick that he carried, upto the level of his throat, surely his son's old trench stick, andthere he let it dangle from a piece of string in the handle, which heheld against his neck. He watched me shrewdly and attentivelymeanwhile, for I was a stranger and was to be taught something Imight not know--a thing that it was necessary for all men to learn. "Le Kaiser, " he said. "Yes;" I said, "the Kaiser. " But I pronouncedthe word Kaiser differently from him, and he repeated again "LeKaiser, " and watched me closely to be sure that I understood. Andthen he said "Pendu, " and made the stick quiver a little as itdangled from its string. "Oui, " I said, "Pendu. " Did I understand? He was not yet quite sure. It was important thatthis thing should be quite decided between us as we stood on thisroad through what had been Croisilles, where he had lived throughmany 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 flintand steel and petrol that the old man had in his pocket. He showed me a photograph of himself and a passport to prove, Isuppose, 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 seenhis 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 tearsfor what we saw across the village of Croisilles. I spoke of the rebuilding of his house no more, I spoke no more ofthe new Croisilles shining through future years; for these were notthe things that he saw in the future, and these were not the hopes ofthe 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 toCroisilles. It was for this hope he lived. Madame or señor of whatever far country, who may chance to see thesewords, blame not this old man for the fierce hope he cherished. Itwas the only hope he had. You, Madame, with your garden, your house, your church, the village where all know you, you may hope as aChristian should, there is wide room for hope in your future. Youshall see the seasons move over your garden, you shall busy yourselfwith your home, and speak and share with your neighbours innumerablesmall joys, and find consolation and beauty, and at last rest, in andaround the church whose spire you see from your home. You, señor, with your son perhaps growing up, perhaps wearing already some swordthat you wore once, you can turn back to your memories or look withhope to the future with equal ease. The man that I met in Croisilles had none of these things at all. Hehad that one hope only. Do not, I pray you, by your voice or vote, or by any power orinfluence that you have, do anything to take away from this poor oldFrenchman the only little hope he has left. The more trivial his oddhope appears to you compared with your own high hopes that come soeasily to you amongst all your fields and houses, the more cruel athing must it be to take it from him. I learned many things in Croisilles, and the last of them is thisstrange one the old man taught me. I turned and shook hands with himand said good-bye, for I wished to see again our old front line thatwe used to hold over the hill, now empty, silent at last. "The Bocheis defeated, " I said. "Vaincu, vaincu, " he repeated. And I left him with something almostlike happiness looking out of his tearful eyes. Bermondsey _versus_ Wurtemburg The trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceasedaltogether, and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of the ghosts ofmurdered trees, all grey and deserted. Descending into Albert past trees in their agony we came all at onceon the houses. You did not see them far off as in other cities; wecame 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 markedoff to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, theslates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel. Near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railwaybridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem asthough it had gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay oneof the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there uponsome flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it hadbeen 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 mechanicalcontrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in amoment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal. When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come downupon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped andwithered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and inthat attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcomeby disaster. Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins, fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that whichthey had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half acrown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a Londonshop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheapknife sticking up from a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is longout 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 waswritten in red paint KOMPe I. M. B. K. 184. The red paint had drippeddown the wall from every letter. Verily we stood upon the scene ofthe murder. Opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces ofa pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design ofgrapes and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outsidethe door. Perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. I entered thehouse and looked round. A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, onlychipped at the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. There werepretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was likethe age-old dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. A man's waistcoatlay on the mud and part of a woman's stays: the waistcoat was blackand was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to seeon the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to thesedays from peace. A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of acorner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was anupper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed ahope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet comeagain and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; thehand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman'sdress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, thelaths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopesmen hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever cometoo late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway'sposture that ever a family would come home there again or tread thosesteps once more. And, if in some far country one should hope, who hasnot seen Albert, out of compassion for these poor people of France, that where a staircase still remains there may be enough of a houseto shelter those who called it home again, I will tell one thingmore: there blew inside that house the same wind that blew outside, the wind that wandered free over miles of plains wandered uncheckedthrough that house; there was no indoors or outdoors any more. And on the wall of the room in which I stood, someone had proudlywritten his regiment's name, The 156th Wurtemburgers. It was writtenin chalk; and another man had come and had written two words beforeit and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. And the writingremains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silentbut for the wind and the things that creak as it blows, the onlymessage of this deserted house, is this mighty record, this rare lineof history, ill-written: "Lost by the 156th Wurtemburgers, retaken bythe Bermondsey Butterflies. " Two men wrote that sentence between them. And, as with Homer, no oneknows 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 greengate by the. Bapaume-Arras road. The cheerful green attracted me inthe deeps of the desolation as an emerald might in a dust-bin. Ientered through that homely garden gate, it had no hinges, nopillars, 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 tendedand 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 dullcrimson. And the presence of this creeper mourning there in the wasteshowed unmistakably that the heap had been a house. All the livingthings were gone that had called this white heap Home: the fatherwould be fighting, somewhere; the children would have fled, if therehad been time; the dog would have gone with them, or perhaps, ifthere was not time, he served other masters; the cat would have madea lair for herself and stalked mice at night through the trenches. All the live things that we ever consider were gone; the creeperalone remained, the only mourner, clinging to fallen stones that hadsupported it once. And I knew by its presence here there had been a house. And by thetexture or composition of the ruin all round I saw that a village hadstood there. There are calamities one does not contemplate, when onethinks of time and change. Death, passing away, even ruin, are allthe human lot; but one contemplates ruin as brought by kindly ages, coming slowly at last, with lichen and ivy and moss, its harsheraspects all hidden with green, coming with dignity and in due season. Thus our works should pass away; our worst fears contemplated no morethan this. But here in a single day, perhaps in a moment with one discharge froma battery, all the little things that one family cared for, theirhouse, their garden; and the garden paths, and then the village andthe road through the village, and the old landmarks that the oldpeople remembered, and countless treasured things, were all turnedinto rubbish. And these things that one did not contemplate, have happened forhundreds of miles, with such disaster vast plains and hills arecovered, because of the German war. Deep wells, old cellars, battered trenches and dug-outs, lie in therubbish and weeds under the intricate wreckage of peace and war. Itwill be a bad place years hence for wanderers lost at night. When the village went, trenches came; and, in the same storm that hadcrumbled the village, the trenches withered too; shells still thumpon 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 pathof old, not a lane nor a doorway there, but is barred and cut off bywire; and the wire in its turn has been cut by shells and lies inungathered swathes. A pair of wheels moulders amongst weeds, and maybe of peace or of war, it is too broken down for anyone to say. Agreat bar of iron lies cracked across as though one of the eldergiants had handled it carelessly. Another mound near by, with an oldgreen beam sticking out of it, was also once a house. A trench runsby 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 youngelder tree grows amongst them. And over all the ruin and rubbishNature, with all her wealth and luxury, comes back to her oldinheritance, holding again the land that she held so long, before thehouses came. A garden gate of iron has been flung across a wall. Then a deepcellar into which a whole house seems to have slanted down. In themidst of all this is an orchard. A huge shell has uprooted, but notkilled, an apple-tree; another apple-tree stands stone dead on theedge of a crater: most of the trees are dead. British aeroplanesdrone over continually. A great gun goes by towards Bapaume, draggedby a slow engine with caterpillar wheels. The gun is all blotchedgreen and yellow. Four or five men are seated on the huge barrelalone. Dark old steps near the orchard run down into a dug-out, with acartridge-case tied to a piece of wood beside it to beat when the gascame. A telephone wire lies listlessly by the opening. A patch ofMichaelmas daisies, deep mauve and pale mauve, and a bright yellowflower beside them, show where a garden used to stand near by. Abovethe dug-out a patch of jagged earth shows in three clear layers underthe weeds: four inches of grey road metal, imported, for all thiscountry is chalk and clay; two inches of flint below it, and underthat an inch of a bright red stone. We are looking then at a road--aroad through a village trodden by men and women, and the hooves ofhorses and familiar modern things, a road so buried, so shattered, soovergrown, showing by chance an edge in the midst of the wilderness, that I could seem rather to have discovered the track of the Dinosaurin prehistoric clays than the highway, of a little village that onlyfive years ago was full of human faults and joys and songs and tinytears. Down that road before the plans, of the Kaiser began to fumblewith the earth, down that road--but it is useless to look back, weare too far away from five years ago, too far away from thousands ofordinary things, that never seemed as though they would ever peer atus over chasms of time, out of another age, utterly far off, irrevocably removed from our ways and days. They are gone, thosetimes, gone like the Dinosaur; gone with bows and arrows and the oldknightlier days. No splendour marks their sunset where I sit, nodignity of houses, or derelict engines of war, mined all equally arescattered dirtily in the mud, and common weeds overpower them; it isnot ruin but rubbish that covers the ground here and spreads itsuntidy flood for hundreds and hundreds of miles. A band plays in Arras, to the north and east the shells go thumpingon. 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 wasNo-Man's-Land, as it is to tell the houses from garden and orchardand road: the rubbish covers all. It is as though the ancient forcesof 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 headhigh, ran right across the village. The Real Thing Once at manoeuvres as the Prussian Crown Prince charged at the headof his regiment, as sabres gleamed, plumes streamed, and hoovesthundered behind him, he is reported to have said to one thatgalloped near him: "Ah, if only this were the real thing!" One need not doubt that the report is true. So a young man might feelas he led his regiment of cavalry, for the scene would fire theblood; all those young men and fine uniforms and good horses, allcoming on behind, everything streaming that could float on the air, everything jingling then which could ever make a sound, a bright skyno doubt over the uniforms, a good fresh wind for men and horses togulp; and behind, the clinking and jingling, the long roll of hoovesthundering. Such a scene might well stir emotions to sigh for thesplendours 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 byarmies, with much to think of; no hope, and a day or two to live. Butwe 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 yousaw any signs of war, when clouds flashed now and then and curiousrockets peered. Albert robbed of peace was deserted even by war. I will not say that Albert was devastated or desolate, for these longwords have different interpretations and may easily be exaggerated. AGerman agent might say to you, "Devastated is rather a strong word, and desolate is a matter of opinion. " And so you might never knowwhat 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 Iwas near the station; and small houses had stood there with littlegardens; 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 ithad clearly been a house. It was at the back of it that mostremained, in what must have been a garden. A girder torn up like apack of cards lay on the leg of a table amongst a brick wall by anapple-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 theedge of the heap lay a doll's green pram. Small though the house hadbeen there was evidence in that heap of some prosperity in more thanone generation. For the four-poster bed had been a fine one, goodwork in sound old timber, before the bits in the girder had driven itinto the wall; and the green pram must have been the dowry of noordinary, doll, but one with the best yellow curls whose blue eyescould 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 hadbeen terribly wrecked by shell fire. All that still stood were dead. Some stood upon the very edge of craters; their leaves and twigs andbark had been stripped by one blast in a moment; and they hadtottered, with stunted, black, gesticulating branches; and so theystood today. The curls of a mattress lay on the ground, clipped once from ahorse's mane. After looking for some while across the orchard one suddenly noticedthat the cathedral had stood on the other side. It was draped, whenwe saw it closer, as with a huge grey cloak, the lead of its roofhaving come down and covered it. Near the house of that petted doll (as I came to think of it) a roadran by on the other side of the railway. Great shells had droppedalong it with terrible regularity. You could imagine Death stridingdown 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, adouble page of a book open at Chapter II: and Chapter II was headedwith the proverb, "Un Malheur Ne Vient Jamais Seul;" Misfortunesnever come singly! And on that dreadful road, with shell-holes everyfive yards as far as the eye could see, and fiat beyond it the wholecity in ruin. What harmless girl or old man had been reading thatdreadful prophecy when the Germans came down upon Albert and involvedit, and themselves, and that book, all except those two pages, insuch multiplication of ruin? Surely, indeed, there is a third side to war: for what had the dolldone, that used to have a green pram, to deserve to share thus in thefall and punishment of an Emperor? A Garden Of Arras As I walked through Arras from the Spanish gate, gardens flashed as Iwent, one by one, through the houses. I stepped in over the window-sill of one of the houses, attracted bythe gleam of a garden dimly beyond: and went through the empty house, empty of people, empty of furniture, empty of plaster, and enteredthe garden through an empty doorway. When I came near it seemed less like a garden. At first it had almostseemed to beckon to passers-by in the street, so rare are gardens nowin this part of France, that it seemed to have more than a garden'sshare of mystery, all in the silence there at the back of the silenthouse; but when one entered it some of the mystery went, and seemedto hide in a further part of the garden amongst wild shrubs andinnumerable weeds. British aeroplanes frequently roared over, disturbing thecongregation of Arras Cathedral a few hundred yards away, who rosecawing and wheeled over the garden; for only jackdaws come to ArrasCathedral 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 gardenpath the skeletons of hothouses stood, surrounded by nettles; theirpipes lay all about, shattered and riddled through. Branches of rose break up through the myriad nettles, but only to beseized and choked by columbine. A late moth looks for flowers notquite in vain. It hovers on wing-beats that are invisibly swift byits lonely autumn flower, then darts away over the desolation whichis no desolation to a moth: man has destroyed man; nature comes back;it is well: that must be the brief philosophy of myriads of tinythings whose way of life one seldom considered before; now that man'scities are down, now that ruin and misery confront us whichever waywe turn, one notices more the small things that are left. One of the greenhouses is almost all gone, a tumbled mass that mightbe a piece of Babylon, if archæologists should come to study it. Butit 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 grassand weeds. On the raised centre many flower-pots were neatly arrangedonce: they stand in orderly lines, but each separate one is broken:none contain flowers any more, but only grass. And the glass of thegreenhouse lies there in showers, all grey. No one has tidiedanything up there for years. A meadow-sweet had come into that greenhouse and dwelt there in thatabode of fine tropical flowers, and one night an elder tree hadentered and is now as high as the house, and at the end of thegreenhouse grass has come in like a wave; for change and disaster arefar-reaching and are only mirrored here. This desolate garden and itsmined house are a part of hundreds of thousands such, or millions. Mathematics will give you no picture of what France has suffered. IfI tell you what one garden is like, one village, one house, onecathedral, after the German war has swept by, and if you read mywords, I may help you perhaps to imagine more easily what France hassuffered 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 nogarden that has suffered less. It is all weeds and elders. An apple-tree rises out of a mass ofnettles, 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 onceI saw a rose-bush that had been planted in a pot and still grewthere, as though it still remembered man, but the flower-pot wasshattered, like all the pots in that garden, and the rose grew wildas any in any hedge. The ivy alone grows on over a mighty wall, and seems to care not. Theivy alone seems not to mourn, but to have added the last four yearsto its growth as though they were ordinary years. That corner of thewall alone whispers not of disaster, it only seems to tell of thepassing of years, which makes the ivy strong, and for which in peaceas in war there is no cure. All the rest speaks of war, of war thatcomes to gardens, without banners or trumpets or splendour, and rootsup everything, and turns round and smashes the house, and leaves itall desolate, and forgets and goes away. And when the histories ofthe war are written, attacks and counter-attacks and the doom ofEmperors, who will remember that garden? Saddest of all, as it seemed to me watching the garden paths, werespiders' webs that had been spun across them, so grey and stout andstrong, fastened from weed to weed, with the spiders in their midstsitting in obvious ownership. You knew then as you looked at thosewebs across all the paths in the garden that any that you might fancywalking the small paths still, were but grey ghosts gone from thence, no more than dreams, hopes and imaginings, something altogetherweaker than spiders webs. And the old wall of the garden that divides it from its neighbour, ofsolid stone and brick, over fifteen feet high, it is that mighty oldwall that held the romance of the garden. I do not tell the tale ofthat garden of Arras, for that is conjecture, and I only tell what Isaw, in order that someone perhaps in some far country may know whathappened in thousands and thousands of gardens because an Emperorsighed, and longed for the splendour of war. The tale is butconjecture, yet all the romance is there; for picture a wall overfifteen feet high built as they built long ago, standing for allthose ages between two gardens. For would not the temptation arise topeer over the wall if a young man heard, perhaps songs, one eveningthe other side? And at first he would have some pretext andafterwards none at all, and the pretext would vary wonderfully littlewith the generations, while the ivy went on growing thicker andthicker. The thought might come of climbing the wall altogether anddown the other side, and it might seem too daring and be utterly putaway. And then one day, some wonderful summer evening, the west allred and a new moon in the sky, far voices heard clearly and whitemists rising, one wonderful summer day, back would come that thoughtto climb the great old wall and go down the other side. Why not go innext door from the street, you might say. That would be different, that would be calling; that would mean ceremony, black hats, andawkward new gloves, constrained talk and little scope for romance. Itwould all be the fault of the wall. With what diffidence, as the generations passed, would each firstpeep over the wall be undertaken. In some years it would be scaledfrom one side, in some ages from the other. What a barrier that oldred wall would have seemed! How new the adventure would have seemedin each age to those that dared it, and how old to the wall! And inall those years the elders never made a door, but kept that huge andhaughty separation. And the ivy quietly grew greener. And then oneday a shell came from the east, and, in a moment, without plan ordiffidence or pretext, tumbled away some yards of the proud old wall, and the two gardens were divided no longer: but there was no one towalk in them any more. Wistfully round the edge of the huge breach in the wall, a Michaelmasdaisy peered into the garden, in whose mined paths I stood. After Hell He heard an English voice shouting, "Paiper! Paiper!" No merespelling of the word will give the intonation. It was the voice ofEnglish towns he heard again. The very voice of London in themorning. It seemed like magic, or like some wonderfully vivid dream. He was only a hundred miles or so from England; it was not very longsince he had been there; yet what he heard seemed like an enchanteddream, because only the day before he had been in the trenches. They had been twelve days in the trenches and had marched out atevening. They had marched five miles and were among tin huts in quitea different world. Through the doorways of the huts green grass couldbe seen and the sun was shining on it. It was morning. Everything wasstrangely different. You saw more faces smiling. Men were not so calmas they had been during the last twelve days, the last sixespecially: someone was kicking a football at somebody else's hut andthere was excitement about it. Guns were still firing: but they thought of death now as one whowalked on the other side of the hills, no longer as a neighbour, asone who might drop in at any moment, and sometime did, while theywere taking tea. It was not that they had been afraid of him, but thestrain of expectancy was over; and that strain being suddenly gone ina single night, they all had a need, whether they knew it or not, ofsomething to take its place, so the football loomed very large. It was morning and he had slept long. The guns that grew active atdawn had not woke him; in those twelve days they had grown toofamiliar, but he woke wide when he heard the young English soldierwith a bundle of three-days-old papers under his arm calling "Paiper, paiper!"--bringing to that strange camp the voice of the Englishtowns. He woke wide at that wonder; and saw the sun shining cheerily, on desolation with a tinge of green in it, which even by itselfrejoiced him on that morning after those twelve days amongst mud, looking at mud, surrounded by mud, protected by mud, sharing with mudthe liability to be suddenly blown high and to come down in a showeron other men's helmets and coats. He wondered if Dante when he came up from Hell heard anyone callingamongst the Verdure, in sunlight, any familiar call such as merchantsuse, some trivial song or cry of his native city. A Happy Valley "The enemy attacked the Happy Valley. " I read these words in a paperat the time of the taking of Albert, for the second time, by ourtroops. And the words brought back Albert to me like a spell, Albertat the end of the mighty Bapaume-Albert road, that pathway Of Marsdown which he had stalked so tremendously through his garden, thewide waste battlefields of the Somme. The words brought back Albertat the end of that road in the sunset and the cathedral seen againstthe west, and the gilded Virgin half cast down, but incapable oflosing dignity, and evening coming down over the marshes. Theybrought it back like a spell. Like two spells rather, that somemagician had mixed. Picture some magician of old in his sombrewonderful, chamber wishing dreams to transport him far off todelectable valleys. He sits him down and writes out a spell onparchment, slowly and with effort of aged memory, though heremembered it easily once. The shadows of crocodiles and antique godsflicker on walls and ceiling from a gusty flame as he writes; and inthe end he writes the spell out wrongly and mixes up with the valleyswhere he would rest dark bits of the regions of Hell. So one seesAlbert again and its Happy Valley. I do not know which the Happy Valley is, for so many little valleysrun 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 ofthem being once named happy. Yet one there is away to the east ofAlbert, which even up to last autumn seemed able to bear this name, so secluded it was in that awful garden of Mars; a tiny valleyrunning into the wood of Bécourt. A few yards, higher up and all wasdesolation, a little further along a lonely road and you saw Albertmourning over irreparable vistas of ruin and wasted fields; but thelittle valley ran into the wood of Bécourt and sheltered there, andthere you saw scarcely any signs of war. It might almost have been anEnglish valley, by the side of an English wood. The soil was the samebrown clay that you see in the south Of England above the downs andthe chalk; the wood was a hazel wood, such as grow in England, thinned a good deal, as English hazels are, but with several talltrees still growing; and plants were there and late flowers, such asgrow in Surrey and Kent. And at the end of the valley, just in theshadow of that familiar homely wood, a hundred British officers restfor 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 dustthat gathers above the ruin of cities may be said to be the cover ofthe most wonderful of the picture-books of Time, those secret booksinto which we sometimes peep. We turn no more, perhaps, than thecorner of a single page in our prying, but we catch a glimpse thereof things so gorgeous, in the book that we are not meant to see, thatit is worth while to travel to far countries, whoever can, to see oneof those books, and where the edges are turned up a little to catchsight of those strange winged bulls and mysterious kings andlion-headed gods that were not meant for us. And out of the glimpses, one catches from odd comers of those volumes of Time, where oldcenturies hide, one builds up part by guesses, part by fancy mixedwith but little knowledge, a tale or theory of how men and womenlived in unknown ages in the faith of forgotten gods. Such a people lived in Timgad and left it probably about the timethat waning Rome began to call home her outposts. Long after thecitizens left the city stood on that high plateau in Africa, teachingshepherd Arabs what Rome had been: even to-day its great arches andparts of its temples stand: its paved streets are still groovedclearly with the wheel-ruts of chariots, and beaten down on each sideof the centre by the pairs of horses that drew them two thousandyears ago. When all the clatter had died away Timgad stood there insilence. At Pompeii, city and citizens ended together. Pompeii did not mournamong 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 lostfaith in its gods, or in itself; conquest from over the desert ordown the Nile, I suppose, or corruption within. Who knows? But oneday I saw a woman come out from the back of her house and empty abasket full of dust and rubbish right into the temple at Luxor, wherea dark green god is seated, three times the size of a man, buried ashigh as his waist. I suppose that what I saw had been happening offand on pretty well every morning for the last four thousand years. Safe under the dust that that woman threw, and the women that livedbefore her, Time hid his secrets. And then I have seen the edges of stones in deserts that might ormight not have been cities: they had fallen so long that you couldhardly say. At all these cities, whether disaster met them, and ruin camesuddenly on to crowded streets; or whether they passed slowly out offashion, and grew quieter year by year while the jackals drew nearerand nearer; at all these cities one can look with interest and not besaddened by the faintest sorrow--for anything that happened to such adifferent people so very long ago. Ram-headed gods, although theirhorns be broken and all their worshippers gone; armies whoseelephants have turned against them; kings whose ancestors haveeclipsed their faces in heaven and left them helpless against theonslaught 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 Timgadamongst its African hills, you see the remnant of a pack of cardslying with what remains of the stock of a draper's shop; and thefront part of the shop and the snug room at the back gape side byside together in equal, misery, as though there had never been abarrier between the counter with its wares and the good mahoganytable with its decanters; then in the rustling of papers that blowwith dust along long-desolate floors one hears the whisper ofDisaster, saying, "See; I have come. " For under plaster shaken downby calamity, and red dust that once was bricks, it is our own agethat is lying; and the little things that lie about the floors arerelics of the twentieth century. Therefore in the streets of Bethunethe wistful appeal that is in all things lost far off and utterlypassed away cries out with an insistence that is never felt in theolder fallen cities. No doubt to future times the age that lies underplaster in Bethune, with thin, bare laths standing over it, willappear an age of glory; and yet to thousands that went one day fromits streets, leaving all manner of small things behind, it may wellhave 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, whateverothers may write, the twentieth-century will not be the age ofstrategy, but will only seem to have been those fourteen lost quietsummers 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 thechalk and marks the end of an epoch and some unknown geologiccatastrophe. It is only by the little things in Bethune, lying where they wereleft, that one can trace at all what kind of house each was, or guessat the people who dwelt in it. It is only by a potato growing wherePavement was, and flowering vigorously under a vacant window, thatone can guess that the battered, house beside it was once afruiterer's shop, whence the potato rolled away when man fell on evildays, and found the street, no longer harsh and unfriendly; but softand fertile like the primal waste, and took root and throve there asits forbears throve before it in another continent before the comingof man. Across the street, in the dust of a stricken house, the implements ofhis trade show where a carpenter lived when disaster came sosuddenly, quite good tools, some still upon shelves, some amongstbroken things that lie all over the floor. And further along thestreet in which these things are someone has put up a great ironshutter that was to protect his shop. It has a graceful border ofpainted, irises all the way up each side. It might have been ajeweller that would have had such a shutter. The shutter aloneremains standing straight upright, and the whole shop is gone. And just here the shaken street ends and all the streets endtogether. The rest is a mound of white stones and pieces of brickswith low, leaning walls surrounding it, and the halves of hollowhouses; 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 asthough he flew over the waste, and as though the waste were his. Thebreeze that carries him opens old shutters and flaps them to again. Old, useless hinges moan; wall-paper whispers. Three French soldierstrying to find their homes walk over the bricks and groundsel. It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off insome fabulous future, nor remembered from terrible ages by the aidof papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes offolk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relicsof bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and brokenbricks. In An Old Drawing-Room There was one house with a roof on it in Peronne. And there anofficer came by moonlight on his way back from leave. He was lookingfor his battalion which had moved and was now somewhere in thedesolation out in front of Peronne, or else was marching there--noone quite knew. Someone said he had seen it marching throughTincourt; the R. T. O. Said Brie. Those who did not know were alwaysready to help, they made suggestions and even pulled out maps. Whyshould they not? They were giving away no secret, because they didnot know, and so they followed a soldier's natural inclination togive all the help they could to another soldier. Therefore theyoffered their suggestions like old friends. They had never metbefore, might never meet again; but La France introduces you, andfive minute acquaintance in a place like Peronne, where things maychange so profoundly in one night, and where all is so tense by thestrange background of ruin that little portions of time seem veryvaluable, 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. Fiveminutes may be a page of history, a chapter even, perhaps a volume. Little children with inky fingers years hence may sit for a wholehour trying to learn up and remember just what happened during fiveminutes in France some time about now. These are just reflectionssuch as pass through the mind in the moonlight among vast ruins andare at once forgotten. Those that knew where the battalion was that the wandering officerlooked for were not many; these were reserved and spoke like one thathas a murder on his conscience, not freely and openly: for of onething no one speaks in France, and that is the exact position of aunit. One may wave one's hand vaguely eastwards and say "Overthere, ", but to name a village and the people that occupy it is tooffend against the silence that in these days broods over France, thesolemn 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 thatquestion settled, there remained only food and sleep. Down in the basement of the big house with a roof there was akitchen, in fact there was everything that a house should have; andthe more that one saw of simple household things, tables, chairs, thefire in the kitchen, pieces of carpet, floors, ceilings, and evenwindows, the more one wondered; it did not seem natural in Peronne. Picture to yourself a fine drawing-room with high ornamental wallsand all the air about it of dignity, peace and ease, that were sorecently gone; only just, as it might have been, stepped through thedouble doorway; skirts, as it were, of ladies only just trailed outof sight; and then turn in fancy to that great town streaming withmoonlight, full of the mystery that moonlight always brings, butwithout the light of it; all black, dark as caverns of earth where nolight ever came, blacker for the moonlight than if no moon werethere; sombre, mourning and accursed, each house in the great streetssheltering darkness amongst its windowless walls; as though it nurseddisaster, having no other children left, and would not let the moonpeer in on its grief or see the monstrous orphan that it fondled. In the old drawing-room with twenty others, the wandering officer laydown to sleep on the floor, and thought of old wars that came to thecities of France a long while ago. To just such houses as this, hethought, men must have come before and gone on next day to fight inother centuries; it seemed to him that it must have been moreromantic then. Who knows? He had a bit of carpet to lie on. A few more officers came in in theearly part of the night, and talked a little and lay down. A fewcandles were stuck on tables here and there. Midnight would havestruck from the towers had any clock been left to strike in Peronne. Still talk went on in low voices here and there. The candles burnedlow and were fewer. Big shadows floated along those old high walls. Then the talk ceased and everyone was still: nothing stirred but theshadows. An officer muttered in sleep of things far thence, and wassilent. Far away shells thumped faintly. The shadows, left tothemselves, went round and round the room, searching in every cornerfor something that was lost. Over walls and ceiling they went andcould not find it. The last candle was failing. It flared andguttered. The shadows raced over the room from comer to corner. Lost, and they could not find it. They hurried desperately in those lastfew moments. Great shadows searching for some little thing. In thesmallest nook they sought for it. Then the last candle died. As theflame went up with the smoke from the fallen wick all the greatshadows turned and mournfully trailed away. The Homes Of Arras As you come to Arras by the western road, by the red ramparts and theSpanish gate, Arras looks like a king. With such a dignity as clingsto the ancient gateway so might a king be crowned; with such a sweepof dull red as the old ramparts show, so might he be robed; but adead king with crowned skull. For the ways of Arras are empty but forbrown soldiers, and her houses are bare as bones. Arras sleeps profoundly, roofless, windowless, carpetless; Arrassleeps as a skeleton sleeps, with all the dignity of former daysabout it, but the life that stirs in its streets is not the oldcity's life, the old city is murdered. I came to Arras and went downa street, and saw back gardens glinting through the bare ribs of thehouses. Garden after garden shone, so far as it could, though it wasin October and after four years of war; but what was left of thosegardens shining there in the sun was like sad faces trying to smileafter many disasters. I came to a great wall that no shell had breached. A cascade ofscarlet creeper poured over it, as though on the other side someserene garden grew, where no disaster came, tended by girls who hadnever heard of war, walking untrodden paths. It was not so. But one'sfancy, weary of ruin, readily turns to such scenes wherever facts arehidden, though but by a tottering wall, led by a few bright leaves orthe glimpse of a flower. But not for any fancy of mine must you picture ruin any more assomething graced with splendour, or as it were an argosy reaching theshores of our day laden with grandeur and dignity out of antiquity. Ruin to-day is not covered with ivy, and has no curious architectureor strange secrets of history, and is not beautiful or romantic atall. It has no tale to tell of old civilizations, not otherwiseknown, told of by few grey stones. Ruin to-day is destruction andsorrow and debt and loss, come down untidily upon modern homes andcutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiartrades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer theguardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget:ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it hasceased to be still green in our memory. Quite ordinary wardrobes inunseemly attitudes gape out from bedrooms whose front walls are gone, in houses whose most inner design shows unconcealed to the cold gazeof the street. The rooms have neither mystery nor adornment. Burstmattresses loll down from bedraggled beds. No one has come to tidythem up for years. And roofs have slanted down as low as the firstfloor. I saw a green door ajar in an upper room: the whole of the front wallof the house was gone: the door partly opened oddly on to a littlestaircase, whose steps one could just see, that one wondered whitherit went. The door seemed to beckon and beckon to some lost room, butif one could ever have got there, up through that shattered house, and if the steps of that little staircase would bear, so that onecame to, the room that is hidden away at the top, yet there couldonly be silence and spiders there, and broken plaster and the dust ofcalamity; it is only to memories that the green door beckons; nothingremains. And some day they may come to Arras to see the romance of war, to seewhere the shells struck and to pick up pieces of iron. It is not thisthat is romantic, not Mars, but poor, limping Peace. It is what isleft that appeals to you, with pathos and infinite charm; littledesolate gardens that no one has tended for years, wall-paper left inforlorn rooms when all else is Scattered, old toys buried in rubbish, old steps untrodden on inaccessible landings: it is what is left thatappeals to you, what remains of old peaceful things. The great gunsthrob on, all round is the panoply of war, if panoply be the rightword for this vast disaster that is known to Arras as innumerableseparate sorrows; but it is not to this great event that-the sympathyturns 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 heartgoes out: floors fallen in festoons, windows that seem to be wailing, roofs as though crazed with grief and then petrified in theircraziness; railings, lamp-posts, sticks, all hit, nothing spared bythat frenzied iron: the very earth clawed and-torn: it is what isleft that appeals to you. As I went from Arras I passed by a grey, gaunt shape, the ghost of arailway station standing in the wilderness haunting a waste of weeds, and mourning, as it seemed, over rusted railway lines lying idle andpurposeless as though leading nowhere, as though all roads hadceased, and all lands were deserted, and all travellers dead:sorrowful and lonely that ghostly shape stood dumb in the desolationamong houses whose doors were shut and their windows broken. And inall that stricken assembly no voice spoke but the sound of irontapping on broken things, which was dumb awhile when the winddropped. The wind rose and it tapped again.