Unhappy Far-Off Things | Page 4

the rubbish that once was villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering for dominion of the world.
The cold wind blew over the blasted heath and bits of broken iron flapped on and on.
And now the traveller hurried, for night was falling, and such a night as three witches might have brewed in a cauldron. He went on eagerly but with infinite sadness. Over the sky-line strange rockets went up from the war, peered oddly over the earth and went down again. Very far off a few soldiers lit a little fire of their own. The night grew colder; tap, tap, went broken iron.
And at last the traveller stopped in the lonely night and looked round him attentively, and appeared to be satisfied that he had come within sight of his journey's end, although to ordinary eyes the spot to which he had come differed in no way from the rest of the waste.
He went no further, but turned round and round, peering piece by piece at that weedy and cratered earth.
He was looking for the village where he was born.

The House With Two Storeys
I came again to Croisilles.
I looked for the sunken road that we used to hold in support, with its row of little shelters in the bank and the carved oak saints above them here and there that had survived the church in Croisilles. I could have found it with my eyes shut. With my eyes open I could not find it. I did not recognize the lonely metalled road down which lorries were rushing for the little lane so full of life, whose wheel-ruts were three years old.
As I gazed about me looking for our line, I passed an old French civilian looking down at a slight mound of white stone that rose a little higher than the road. He was walking about uncertainly, when first I noticed him, as though he was not sure where he was. But now he stood quite still looking down at the mound.
"Voilà ma maison," he said.
He said no more than that: this astounding remark, this gesture that indicated such calamity, were quite simply made. There was nothing whatever of theatrical pose that we wrongly associate with the French, because they conceal their emotions less secretly than we; there were no tragic tones in his voice: only a trace of deep affection showed in one of the words he used. He spoke as a woman might say of her only child, "Look at my baby."
"Voilà ma maison," he said.
I tried to say in his language what I felt; and after my attempt he spoke of his house.
It was very old. Down underneath, he said, it dated from feudal times; though I did not quite make out whether all that lay under that mound had been so old or whether he only meant the cellars of his house. It was a fine high house, he said, as much as two storeys high. No one that is familiar with houses of fifty storeys, none even that has known palaces, will smile at this old man's efforts to tell of his high house, and to make me believe that it rose to two storeys high, as we stood together by that sad white mound. He told me that his son was killed. And that disaster strangely did not move me so much as the white mound that had been a house and had had two storeys, for it seems to be common to every French family with whose fathers I have chanced to speak in ruined cities or on busy roads of France.
He pointed to a huge white mound beyond on the top of which someone had stuck a small cross of wood. "The church," he said. And that I knew already.
In very inadequate French I tried to comfort him. 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. When I had finished speaking of the future, he raised a knobbed stick that he carried, up to the level of his throat, surely his son's old trench stick, and there he let it dangle from a piece of string in the handle, which he held against his neck. He watched me shrewdly and attentively meanwhile, for I