Unhappy Far-Off Things | Page 6

pretence laid bare, the slates
gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel. Near it
lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway bridge; a
shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as though it had
gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay one of the great steel
supports of the bridge that had floated there upon some flaming draught;

the end of it bent and splayed as though it had been a slender cane that
someone had shoved too hard into the earth.
There had been a force abroad in Albert that could do these things, an
iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical contrivance
that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a moment as a
child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal.
When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come
down upon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped
and withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and
in that attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps
overcome by disaster.
Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins,
fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which they
had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a crown
apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London shop,
but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap knife
sticking up from a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is long out of
fashion.
The stale smell of war arose from the desolation.
A British helmet dinted in like an old bowler, but tragic not absurd, lay
near a barrel and a teapot.
On a wall that rose above a heap of dirty and smashed rafters was
written in red paint KOMPe I.M.B.K. 184. The red paint had dripped
down the wall from every letter. Verily we stood upon the scene of the
murder.
Opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces of a
pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of grapes
and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outside the
door.
Perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. I entered the house
and looked round.
A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, only chipped at
the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. There were pretty tiles on
the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was like the age-old dirt that
gathers in temples in Africa. 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; the hand-rail and the banisters
streamed down from the top, a woman's dress lolled down from the
upper room above those aimless steps, the laths of the ceiling gaped,
the plaster was gone; of all the hopes men hope that can never be
fulfilled, of all desires that ever come too late, most futile was the hope
expressed by that stairway's posture that ever a family would come
home there again or tread those steps once more. And, if in some far
country one should hope, who has not seen Albert, out of compassion
for these poor people of France, that where a staircase still remains
there may be enough of a house to shelter those who called it home
again, I will tell one thing more: there blew inside that house the same
wind that blew outside, the wind that wandered free over miles of
plains wandered unchecked through that house; there was no indoors or
outdoors any more.
And on the wall of the room in which I stood, someone had proudly
written his regiment's name, The 156th Wurtemburgers. It was written
in chalk; and another man had come and had written two words before
it and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. And the writing
remains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silent but
for the wind and the things that creak as it blows, the only message of
this deserted house, is this mighty