a piece of Babylon, if archaeologists should come to study it. But
it is too sad to study, too untidy to have any interest, and, alas,
too common: there are hundreds of miles of this.

The other greenhouse, a sad, ungainly skeleton, is possessed by grass
and weeds. On the raised centre many flower-pots were neatly arranged
once: they stand in orderly lines, but each separate one is broken:
none contain flowers any more, but only grass. And the glass of the
greenhouse lies there in showers, all grey. No one has tidied
anything up there for years.

A meadow-sweet had come into that greenhouse and dwelt there in that
abode of fine tropical flowers, and one night an elder tree had
entered and is now as high as the house, and at the end of the
greenhouse grass has come in like a wave; for change and disaster are
far-reaching and are only mirrored here. This desolate garden and its
mined house are a part of hundreds of thousands such, or millions.
Mathematics will give you no picture of what France has suffered. If
I tell you what one garden is like, one village, one house, one
cathedral, after the German war has swept by, and if you read my
words, I may help you perhaps to imagine more easily what France has
suffered than if I spoke of millions. I speak of one garden in Arras;
and you might walk from there, south by east for weeks, and find no
garden that has suffered less.

It is all weeds and elders. An apple-tree rises out of a mass of
nettles, but it is quite dead. Wild rose-trees show here and there,
or roses that have ran wild like the cats of No-Man's-Land: And once
I saw a rose-bush that had been planted in a pot and still grew
there, as though it still remembered man, but the flower-pot was
shattered, like all the pots in that garden, and the rose grew wild
as any in any hedge.

The ivy alone grows on over a mighty wall, and seems to care not. The
ivy alone seems not to mourn, but to have added the last four years
to its growth as though they were ordinary years. That corner of the
wall alone whispers not of disaster, it only seems to tell of the
passing of years, which makes the ivy strong, and for which in peace
as in war there is no cure. All the rest speaks of war, of war that
comes to gardens, without banners or trumpets or splendour, and roots
up everything, and turns round and smashes the house, and leaves it
all desolate, and forgets and goes away. And when the histories of
the war are written, attacks