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 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.