As I walked through Arras from the Spanish gate, gardens flashed as I
went, one by one, through the houses.
I stepped in over the window-sill of one of the houses, attracted by
the gleam of a garden dimly beyond: and went through the empty house,
empty of people, empty of furniture, empty of plaster, and entered
the garden through an empty doorway.
When I came near it seemed less like a garden. At first it had almost
seemed to beckon to passers-by in the street, so rare are gardens now
in this part of France, that it seemed to have more than a garden’s
share of mystery, all in the silence there at the back of the silent
house; but when one entered it some of the mystery went, and seemed
to hide in a further part of the garden amongst wild shrubs and
innumerable weeds.
British aeroplanes frequently roared over, disturbing the
congregation of Arras Cathedral a few hundred yards away, who rose
cawing and wheeled over the garden; for only jackdaws come to Arras
Cathedral 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 garden
path the skeletons of hothouses stood, surrounded by nettles; their
pipes lay all about, shattered and riddled through.
Branches of rose break up through the myriad nettles, but only to be
seized and choked by columbine. A late moth looks for flowers not
quite in vain. It hovers on wing-beats that are invisibly swift by
its lonely autumn flower, then darts away over the desolation which
is no desolation to a moth: man has destroyed man; nature comes back;
it is well: that must be the brief philosophy of myriads of tiny
things whose way of life one seldom considered before; now that man’s
cities are down, now that ruin and misery confront us whichever way
we turn, one notices more the small things that are left.
One of the greenhouses is almost all gone, a tumbled mass that might
be a piece of Babylon, if archæologists should come to study it. But
it 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 grass
and weeds. On the raised centre many flower-pots were neatly arranged
once: they stand in orderly lines, but each separate one is broken:
none contain flowers any more, but only grass. And the glass of the
greenhouse lies there in showers, all grey. No one has tidied
anything up there for years.
A meadow-sweet had come into that greenhouse and dwelt there in that
abode of fine tropical flowers, and one night an elder tree had
entered and is now as high as the house, and at the end of the
greenhouse grass has come in like a wave; for change and disaster are
far-reaching and are only mirrored here. This desolate garden and its
ruined house are a part of hundreds of thousands such, or millions.
Mathematics will give you no picture of what France has suffered. If
I tell you what one garden is like, one village, one house, one
cathedral, after the German war has swept by, and if you read my
words, I may help you perhaps to imagine more easily what France has
suffered 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 no
garden that has suffered less.
It is all weeds and elders. An apple-tree rises out of a mass of
nettles, 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 once
I saw a rose-bush that had been planted in a pot and still grew
there, as though it still remembered man, but the flower-pot was
shattered, like all the pots in that garden, and the rose grew wild
as any in any hedge.
The ivy alone grows on over a mighty wall, and seems to care not. The
ivy alone seems not to mourn, but to have added the last four years
to its growth as though they were ordinary years. That corner of the
wall alone whispers not of disaster, it only seems to tell of the
passing of years, which makes the ivy strong, and for which in peace
as in war there is no cure. All the rest speaks of war, of war that
comes to gardens, without banners or trumpets or splendour, and roots
up everything, and turns round and smashes the house, and leaves it
all desolate, and forgets and goes away. And when the histories of
the war are written, attacks and counter-attacks and the doom of
Emperors, who will remember that garden?
Saddest of all, as it seemed to me watching the garden paths, were
spiders’ webs that had been spun across them, so grey and stout and
strong, fastened from weed to weed, with the spiders in their midst
sitting in obvious ownership. You knew then as you looked at those
webs across all the paths in the garden that any that you might fancy
walking the small paths still, were but grey ghosts gone from thence,
no more than dreams, hopes and imaginings, something altogether
weaker than spiders webs.
And the old wall of the garden that divides it from its neighbour, of
solid stone and brick, over fifteen feet high, it is that mighty old
wall that held the romance of the garden. I do not tell the tale of
that garden of Arras, for that is conjecture, and I only tell what I
saw, in order that someone perhaps in some far country may know what
happened in thousands and thousands of gardens because an Emperor
sighed, and longed for the splendour of war. The tale is but
conjecture, yet all the romance is there; for picture a wall over
fifteen feet high built as they built long ago, standing for all
those ages between two gardens. For would not the temptation arise to
peer over the wall if a young man heard, perhaps songs, one evening
the other side? And at first he would have some pretext and
afterwards none at all, and the pretext would vary wonderfully little
with the generations, while the ivy went on growing thicker and
thicker. The thought might come of climbing the wall altogether and
down the other side, and it might seem too daring and be utterly put
away. And then one day, some wonderful summer evening, the west all
red and a new moon in the sky, far voices heard clearly and white
mists rising, one wonderful summer day, back would come that thought
to climb the great old wall and go down the other side. Why not go in
next door from the street, you might say. That would be different,
that would be calling; that would mean ceremony, black hats, and
awkward new gloves, constrained talk and little scope for romance. It
would all be the fault of the wall.
With what diffidence, as the generations passed, would each first
peep over the wall be undertaken. In some years it would be scaled
from one side, in some ages from the other. What a barrier that old
red wall would have seemed! How new the adventure would have seemed
in each age to those that dared it, and how old to the wall! And in
all those years the elders never made a door, but kept that huge and
haughty separation. And the ivy quietly grew greener. And then one
day a shell came from the east, and, in a moment, without plan or
diffidence or pretext, tumbled away some yards of the proud old wall,
and the two gardens were divided no longer: but there was no one to
walk in them any more.
Wistfully round the edge of the huge breach in the wall, a Michaelmas
daisy peered into the garden, in whose ruined paths I stood.