Unhappy Far-Off Things | Page 7

record, this rare line of history,
ill-written: "Lost by the 156th Wurtemburgers, retaken by the
Bermondsey Butterflies."
Two men wrote that sentence between them. And, as with Homer, no
one knows who they were. And; like Homer, their words were epic.

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; all the rest was battle-field,
as far as the eye could see. 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; the
creeper alone remained, the only mourner, clinging to fallen stones that
had supported it once.
And I knew by its presence here there had been a house. 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. Thus our
works should pass away; our worst fears contemplated no more than
this.
But here in a single day, perhaps in a moment with one discharge from
a battery, all the little things that one family cared for, their house, their
garden; and the garden paths, and then the village and the road through
the village, and the old landmarks that the old people remembered, and
countless treasured things, were all turned into rubbish.
And these things that one did not contemplate, have happened for
hundreds of miles, with such disaster vast plains and hills are covered,
because of the German war.
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. Not a path of old, not a lane

nor a doorway there, but is barred and cut off by wire; and the wire in
its turn has been cut by shells and lies in ungathered swathes. A pair of
wheels moulders amongst weeds, and may be of peace or of war, it is
too broken down for anyone to say. A great bar of iron lies cracked
across as though one of the elder giants had handled it carelessly.
Another mound near by, with an old green beam sticking out of it, was
also once a house. A trench runs by it. 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; another apple-tree stands stone dead on the edge of a crater:
most of the trees are dead. British aeroplanes drone over continually. A
great gun goes by towards Bapaume, dragged by a slow engine with
caterpillar wheels. The gun is all blotched green and yellow. Four or
five men are seated on