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.