guardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget:
ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has
ceased to be still green in our memory. Quite ordinary wardrobes in
unseemly attitudes gape out from bedrooms whose front walls are gone,
in houses whose most inner design shows unconcealed to the cold gaze
of the street. The rooms have neither mystery nor adornment. Burst
mattresses loll down from bedraggled beds. No one has come to tidy
them up for years. And roofs have slanted down as low as the first
floor.
I saw a green door ajar in an upper room: the whole of the front wall
of the house was gone: the door partly opened oddly on to a little
staircase, whose steps one could just see, that one wondered whither
it went. The door seemed to beckon and beckon to some lost room, but
if one could ever have got there, up through that shattered house,
and if the steps of that little staircase would bear, so that one
came to, the room that is hidden away at the top, yet there could
only be silence and spiders there, and broken plaster and the dust of
calamity; it is only to memories that the green door beckons; nothing
remains.
And some day they may come to Arras to see the romance of war, to see
where the shells struck and to pick up pieces of iron. It is not this
that is romantic, not Mars, but poor, limping Peace. It is what is
left that appeals to you, with pathos and infinite charm; little
desolate gardens that no one has tended for years, wall-paper left in
forlorn rooms when all else is Scattered, old toys buried in rubbish,
old steps untrodden on inaccessible landings: it is what is left that
appeals to you, what remains of old peaceful things. The great guns
throb on, all round is the panoply of war, if panoply be the right
word for this vast disaster that is known to Arras as innumerable
separate sorrows; but it is not to this great event that-the sympathy
turns in Arras, nor to its thunder and show, nor the trappings of it,
guns lorries, and fragments of shells: it is to the voiceless,
deserted inanimate things, so greatly wronged, that all the heart
goes out: floors fallen in festoons, windows that seem to be wailing,
roofs as though crazed with grief and then petrified in their
craziness; railings, lamp-posts, sticks, all hit, nothing spared by
that frenzied iron: the very earth clawed and-torn: it is what is
left that appeals to you.
As I went from Arras I passed by a gre
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