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?