The war relics of devastated structures leave a sad and painful
impression. Of the many deserted battlefields which I have seen during
the two years past, the nameless little graves faintly marked with
little wooden crosses, of the deserted trenches, nothing gave me so
much food for deep and sad reflection as the bare and lonely chimneys
projecting from amid piles of rubbish, melancholy blackened pots, the
scattered remnants of domesticity; a smashed pail, a broken wheel, a
binding of a torn book, the splinters of what was once a crib.
To think that hereabout dwelt a family; that they were contented and
possibly happy! Those walls, stripped and crumbled, what have they not
seen!
It always seems to me that an event having occurred at a given place,
the memory of the occurrence attaches permanently to it. Whenever I
happened to find myself in a locality in which some memorable events
had taken place I could not think of those events without at the
same time visualizing the surroundings amid which they occurred; and
the more recent the occurrence, the more vividly I can see the scene
unfolding itself before my eyes.
The vast number of such impressions which the present war has produced
make a film, vivid and endless.