Unhappy Far-Off Things | Page 2

lead, here
and there lingered, like lonely leaves on an apple-tree-after a hailstorm
in spring. The aisles still had their roofs over them which those stout
old walls held up in spite of all.
Where the nave joins the transept the ruin is most enormous. Perhaps
there was more to bring down there, so the Germans brought it down:
there may have been a tower there, for all I know, or a spire.
I stood on the heap and looked towards the altar. To my left all was
ruin. To my right two old saints in stone stood by the southern door.
The door had been forced open long ago, and stood as it was opened,
partly broken. A great round hole gaped in the ground outside; it was
this that had opened the door.
Just beyond the big heap, on the left of the chancel, stood something
made of wood, which almost certainly had been the organ.
As I looked at these things there passed through the desolate
sanctuaries, and down an aisle past pillars pitted with shrapnel, a sad
old woman, sad even for a woman of North-East France. She seemed to

be looking after the mounds and stones that had once been the cathedral;
perhaps she had once been the Bishop's servant, or the wife of one of
the vergers; she only remained of all who had been there in other days,
she and the pigeons and jackdaws. I spoke to her. All Arras, she said,
was ruined. The great cathedral was ruined, her own family were ruined
utterly, and she pointed to where the sad houses gazed from forlorn
dead windows. Absolute ruin, she said; but there must be no armistice.
No armistice. No. It was necessary that there should be no armistice at
all. No armistice with Germans.
She passed on, resolute and sad, and the guns boomed on beyond
Arras.
A French interpreter, with the Sphinxes' heads on his collar, showed me
a picture postcard with a photograph of the chancel as it was five years
ago. It was the very chancel before which I was standing. To see that
photograph astonished me, and to know that the camera that took it
must have stood where I was standing, only a little lower down, under
the great heap. Though one knew there had been an altar there, and
candles and roof and carpet, and all the solemnity of a cathedral's
interior, yet to see that photograph and to stand on that weedy heap, in
the wind, under the jackdaws, was a contrast with which the mind
fumbled.
I walked a little with the French interpreter. We came to a little shrine
in the southern aisle. It had been all paved with marble, and the marble
was broken into hundreds of pieces, and someone had carefully picked
up all the bits, and laid them together on the altar.
And this pathetic heap that was gathered of broken bits had drawn
many to stop and gaze at it; and idly, as soldiers will, they had written
their names on them: every bit had a name on it, with but a touch of
irony the Frenchman said, "All that is necessary to bring your name to
posterity is to write it on one of these stones.", "No," I said, "I will do it
by describing all this." And we both laughed.
I have not done it yet: there is more to say of Arras. As I begin the tale
of ruin and wrong, the man who did it totters. His gaudy power begins
to stream away like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne will be bare,
and I shall have but begun to say what I have to say of calamity in
cathedral and little gardens of Arras.
The winter of the Hohenzollerns will come; sceptre, uniforms, stars and

courtiers all gone; still the world will not know half of the bitter wrongs
of Arras. And spring will bring a new time and cover the trenches with
green, and the pigeons will preen themselves on the shattered towers,
and the lime-trees along the steps will grow taller and brighter, and
happier men will sing in the streets untroubled by any War Lord; by
then, perhaps, I may have told, to such as care to read, what such a war
did in an ancient town, already romantic when romance was young,
when war came suddenly without mercy, without pity, out of the north
and east, on little houses, carved galleries, and gardens; churches,
cathedrals and the jackdaws' nests.

A Good War
Nietsche said, "You have heard that a good cause justifies any war, but
I say unto you that a good war justifies any cause."
A man was walking alone over a plain so desolate that, if you