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.