roken 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