“The enemy attacked the Happy Valley.” I read these words in a paper
at the time of the taking of Albert, for the second time, by our
troops. And the words brought back Albert to me like a spell, Albert
at the end of the mighty Bapaume-Albert road, that pathway of Mars
down which he had stalked so tremendously through his garden, the
wide waste battlefields of the Somme. The words brought back Albert
at the end of that road in the sunset and the cathedral seen against
the west, and the gilded Virgin half cast down, but incapable of
losing dignity, and evening coming down over the marshes. They
brought it back like a spell. Like two spells rather, that some
magician had mixed. Picture some magician of old in his sombre
wonderful, chamber wishing dreams to transport him far off to
delectable valleys. He sits him down and writes out a spell on
parchment, slowly and with effort of aged memory, though he
remembered it easily once. The shadows of crocodiles and antique gods
flicker on walls and ceiling from a gusty flame as he writes; and in
the end he writes the spell out wrongly and mixes up with the valleys
where he would rest dark bits of the regions of Hell. So one sees
Albert again and its Happy Valley.
I do not know which the Happy Valley is, for so many little valleys
run in and out about Albert; and with a little effort of imagination,
having only seen them full of the ruin of war, one can fancy any of
them being once named happy. Yet one there is away to the east of
Albert, which even up to last autumn seemed able to bear this name,
so secluded it was in that awful garden of Mars; a tiny valley
running into the wood of Bécourt. A few yards, higher up and all was
desolation, a little further along a lonely road and you saw Albert
mourning over irreparable vistas of ruin and wasted fields; but the
little valley ran into the wood of Bécourt and sheltered there, and
there you saw scarcely any signs of war. It might almost have been an
English valley, by the side of an English wood. The soil was the same
brown clay that you see in the south of England above the downs and
the chalk; the wood was a hazel wood, such as grow in England,
thinned a good deal, as English hazels are, but with several tall
trees still growing; and plants were there and late flowers, such as
grow in Surrey and Kent. And at the end of the valley, just in the
shadow of that familiar homely wood, a hundred British officers rest
for ever.
As the world is to-day perhaps that obscure spot, as fittingly as any,
might be named the Happy Valley.