Lower down in the heap was the frame-work of a large four-poster bed; through it all a vine came up quite green and still alive; and at the edge of the heap lay a doll’s green pram. Small though the house had been there was evidence in that heap of some prosperity in more than one generation. For the four-poster bed had been a fine one, good work in sound old timber, before the bits in the girder had driven it into the wall; and the green pram must have been the dowry of no ordinary, doll, but one with the best yellow curls whose blue eyes could move. One blue columbine close by mourned alone for the garden.
The wall and the vine and the bed and the girder lay in an orchard, and some of the apple-trees were standing yet, though the orchard had been terribly wrecked by shell fire. All that still stood were dead. Some stood upon the very edge of craters; their leaves and twigs and bark had been stripped by one blast in a moment; and they had tottered, with stunted, black, gesticulating branches; and so they stood to-day.
The curls of a mattress lay on the ground, clipped once from a horse’s mane.
After looking for some while across the orchard one suddenly noticed that the cathedral had stood on the other side. It was draped, when we saw it closer, as with a huge grey cloak, the lead of its roof having come down and covered it.
Near the house of that petted doll (as I came to think of it) a road ran by on the other side of the railway. Great shells had dropped along it with terrible regularity. You could imagine Death striding down it with exact five-yard paces, on his own day, claiming his own. As I stood on the road something whispered behind me; and I saw, stirring round with the wind, in one of those footsteps of Death, a double page of a book open at Chapter II: and Chapter II was headed with the proverb, “Un Malheur Ne Vient Jamais Seul;” Misfortunes never come singly! And on that dreadful road, with shell-holes every five yards as far as the eye could see, and flat beyond it the whole city in ruin. What harmless girl or old man had been reading that dreadful prophecy when the Germans came down upon Albert and involved it, and themselves, and that book, all except those two pages, in such multiplication of ruin?
Surely, indeed, there is a third side to war: for what had the doll done, that used to have a green pram, to deserve to share thus in the fall and punishment of an Emperor?
A Garden Of Arras
As I walked through Arras from the Spanish gate, gardens flashed as I went, one by one, through the houses.
I stepped in over the window-sill of one of the houses, attracted by the gleam of a garden dimly beyond: and went through the empty house, empty of people, empty of furniture, empty of plaster, and entered the garden through an empty doorway.
When I came near it seemed less like a garden. At first it had almost seemed to beckon to passers-by in the street, so rare are gardens now in this part of France, that it seemed to have more than a garden’s share of mystery, all in the silence there at the back of the silent house; but when one entered it some of the mystery went, and seemed to hide in a further part of the garden amongst wild shrubs and innumerable weeds.