by Edward Plunkett

“ The rest is a mound of white stones and pieces of bricks with low, leaning walls surrounding it, and the halves of hollow houses; and eyeing it round a comer, one old tower of the cathedral, as though still gazing over its congregation of houses, a mined, melancholy watcher. Over the bricks lie tracks, but no more streets. It is about the middle of the town, a hawk goes over, calling as though he flew over the waste, and as though the waste were his. The breeze that carries him opens old shutters and flaps them to again. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 mined house are a part of hundreds of thousands such, or millions. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Ruin to-day is destruction and sorrow and debt and loss, come down untidily upon modern homes and cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the guardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget: ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has ceased to be still green in our memory. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But not for any fancy of mine must you picture ruin any more as something graced with splendour, or as it were an argosy reaching the shores of our day laden with grandeur and dignity out of antiquity. Ruin to-day is not covered with ivy, and has no curious architecture or strange secrets of history, and is not beautiful or romantic at all. It has no tale to tell of old civilizations, not otherwise known, told of by few grey stones. ”

“ No splendour marks their sunset where I sit, no dignity of houses, or derelict engines of war, mined 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. ”

“ It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in some fabulous future, nor remembered from terrible ages by the aid of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken bricks. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is what is left that appeals to you, with pathos and infinite charm; little desolate gardens that no one has tended for years, wall-paper left in forlorn rooms when all else is Scattered, old toys buried in rubbish, old steps untrodden on inaccessible landings: it is what is left that appeals to you, what remains of old peaceful things. The great guns throb on, all round is the panoply of war, if panoply be the right word for this vast disaster that is known to Arras as innumerable separate sorrows ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ They have come to Arras with the wind and the rain; which enter the aisles together whenever they will, and go wherever man went; they have such a reverent air, the young limes on the three flights of steps, that you would say they did not know that Arras Cathedral was fallen on evil days, that they did not know they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but thought that these great walls open to stars and sun were the natural and fitting place for the worship of little weeds. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ At all these cities, whether disaster met them, and ruin came suddenly on to crowded streets; or whether they passed slowly out of fashion, and grew quieter year by year while the jackals drew nearer and nearer; at all these cities one can look with interest and not be saddened by the faintest sorrow--for anything that happened to such a different people so very long ago. Ram-headed gods, although their horns be broken and all their worshippers gone; armies whose elephants have turned against them ”

“ For under plaster shaken down by calamity, and red dust that once was bricks, it is our own age that is lying; and the little things that lie about the floors are relics of the twentieth century. Therefore in the streets of Bethune the wistful appeal that is in all things lost far off and utterly passed away cries out with an insistence that is never felt in the older fallen cities. No doubt to future times the age that lies under plaster in Bethune, with thin, bare laths standing over it, will appear an age of glory ”

“ I went up the steps amongst them, the only human thing, for men and women worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have come instead; little humble things, all less than four years old, in great numbers thronging the steps processionally, and growing in perfect rows just where step meets step. ”

“ And out of the glimpses, one catches from odd comers of those volumes of Time, where old centuries hide, one builds up part by guesses, part by fancy mixed with but little knowledge, a tale or theory of how men and women lived in unknown ages in the faith of forgotten gods. ”

“ It is only by a potato growing where Pavement was, and flowering vigorously under a vacant window, that one can guess that the battered, house beside it was once a fruiterer's shop, whence the potato rolled away when man fell on evil days, and found the street, no longer harsh and unfriendly; but soft and fertile like the primal waste, and took root and throve there as its forbears throve before it in another continent before the coming of man. ”

“ A man was walking alone over a plain so desolate that, if you have never seen it, the mere word desolation could never convey to you the melancholy surroundings that mourned about this man on his lonely walk. ”

“ On An Old Battle-Field 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Quite ordinary wardrobes in unseemly attitudes gape out from bedrooms whose front walls are gone, in houses whose most inner design shows unconcealed to the cold gaze of the street. The rooms have neither mystery nor adornment. Burst mattresses loll down from bedraggled beds. No one has come to tidy them up for years. ”

“ I told him that surely France would build his house again. Perhaps even the allies; for I could not believe that we shall have done enough if we merely drive the Germans out of France and leave this poor old man still wandering homeless. I told him that surely in the future Croisilles would stand again.
He took no interest in anything that I said. His house of two storeys was down, his son was dead, the little village of Croisilles had gone away; he had only one hope from the future. ”

“ 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 ”

“ The left-hand corner of that western wall has been caught from the north, by some tremendous shell which has torn the whole corner down in a mound of stone: and still the walls have stood.
I went in through the western doorway. All along the nave lay a long heap of white stones, with grass and weeds on the top, and a little trodden path over the grass and weeds. This is all that remained of the roof of Arras Cathedral and of any chairs or pews there may have been in the nave, or anything that may have hung above them. ”

“ A man's waistcoat lay on the mud and part of a woman's stays: the waistcoat was black and was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to see on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these days from peace.
A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of a corner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was an upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps ”