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.