le, 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 the huge barrel
alone.

Dark old steps near the orchard run down into a dug-out, with a
cartridge-case tied to a piece of wood beside it to beat when the gas
came. A telephone wire lies listlessly by the opening. A patch of
Michaelmas daisies, deep mauve and pale mauve, and a bright yellow
flower beside them, show where a garden used to stand near by. Above
the dug-out a patch of jagged earth shows in three clear layers under
the weeds: four inches of grey road metal, imported, for all this
country is chalk and clay; two inches of flint below it, and under
that an inch of a bright red stone. We are looking then at a road--a
road through a village trodden by men and women, and the hooves of
horses and familiar modern things, a road so buried, so shattered, so
overgrown, showing by chance an edge in the midst of the wilderness,
that I could seem rather to have discovered the track of the Dinosaur
in prehistoric clays than the highway, of a little village that only
five years ago was full of human faults and joys and songs and tiny
tears. Down that road before the plans, of the Kaiser began to fumble
with the earth, down that road--but it is useless to look back, we
are too far away from five years ago, too far away from thousands of
ordinary things, that never seemed as though they would ever peer at
us over chasms of time, out of another age, utterly far off,
irrevocably removed from our ways and days. They are gone, those
times, gone like the Dinosaur; gone with bows and arrows and the old
knightlier days. No splendour marks their sunset where I sit, no
dignity of houses, or derelict engines of war, mined all e