that is necessary to bring
your name to posterity is to write it on one of these stones.", "No,"
I said, "I will do it by describing all this." And we both laughed.

I have not done it yet: there is more to say of Arras. As I begin the
tale of ruin and wrong, the man who did it totters. His gaudy power
begins to stream away like the leaves of autumn. Soon his throne will
be bare, and I shall have but begun to say what I have to say of
calamity in cathedral and little gardens of Arras.

The winter of the Hohenzollerns will come; sceptre, uniforms, stars
and courtiers all gone; still the world will not know half of the
bitter wrongs of Arras. And spring will bring a new time and cover
the trenches with green, and the pigeons will preen themselves on the
shattered towers, and the lime-trees along the steps will grow taller
and brighter, and happier men will sing in the streets untroubled by
any War Lord; by then, perhaps, I may have told, to such as care to
read, what such a war did in an ancient town, already romantic when
romance was young, when war came suddenly without mercy, without
pity, out of the north and east, on little houses, carved galleries,
and gardens; churches, cathedrals and the jackdaws' nests.

A Good War

Nietsche said, "You have heard that a good cause justifies any war,
but I say unto you that a good war justifies any cause."

A man was walking alone over a plain so desolate that, if you have
never seen it, the mere word desolation could never convey to you the
melancholy surroundings that mourned about this man on his lonely
walk. Far off a vista of trees followed a cheerless road all dead as
mourners suddenly stricken dead in some funereal procession. By this
road he had come; but when he had reached a certain point he turned
from the road at once, branching away to the left, led by a line of
bushes that may once have been a lane. For some while his feet had
rustled through long neglected grass; sometimes he lifted them up to
step over a telephone wire that lolled over old entanglements and
bushes; often he came to rusty strands of barbed wire and walked
through them where they had been cut, perhaps years ago, by huge
shells; then his feet hissed on through the grass again, dead grass
that had hissed about his boots all through the afternoon.

Once he sat down to rest on the edge of a crater, weary with such
walking as he had never seen before; and after he had stayed there a
little