ry
five yards as far as the eye could see, and fiat 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.

British aeroplanes frequently roared over, disturbing the
congregation of Arras Cathedral a few hundred yards away, who rose
cawing and wheeled over the garden; for only jackdaws come to Arras
Cathedral now, besides a few pigeons.

Unkempt beside me a bamboo flourished wildly, having no need of man.
On the other side of the small wild track that had been the garden
path the skeletons of hothouses stood, surrounded by nettles; their
pipes lay all about, shattered and riddled through.

Branches of rose break up through the myriad nettles, but only to be
seized and choked by columbine. A late moth looks for flowers not
quite in vain. It hovers on wing-beats that are invisibly swift by
its lonely autumn flower, then darts away over the desolation which
is no desolation to a moth: man has destroyed man; nature comes back;
it is well: that must be the brief philosophy of myriads of tiny
things whose way of life one seldom considered before; now that man's
cities are down, now that ruin and misery confront us whichever way
we turn, one notices more the small things that are left.

One of the greenhouses is almost all gone, a tumbled mass that might
be