Unhappy Far-Off Things by Lord Dunsany (open ebook .TXT) 📗

wall that rose above a heap of dirty and smashed rafters was written in red paint KOMPe I.M.B.K. 184. The red paint had dripped down the wall from every letter. Verily we stood upon the scene of the murder.

Opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces of a pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of grapes and vine. Someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outside the door.

Perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. I entered the house and looked round.

A chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, only chipped at the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. There were pretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was like the age-old dirt that gathers in temples in Africa. A man's waistcoat lay on the mud and part of a woman's stays: the waistcoat was black and was probably kept for Sundays. That was all that there was to see on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these days from peace.

A forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. It went up out of a corner of the room. It seemed still to believe that there was an upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; the hand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman's dress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, the laths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopes men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway's posture that ever a family would come home there again or tread those steps once more. And, if in some far country one should hope, who has not seen Albert, out of compassion for these poor people of France, that where a staircase still remains there may be enough of a house to shelter those who called it home again, I will tell one thing more: there blew inside that house the same wind that blew outside, the wind that wandered free over miles of plains wandered unchecked through that house; there was no indoors or outdoors any more.

And on the wall of the room in which I stood, someone had proudly written his regiment's name, The 156th Wurtemburgers. It was written in chalk; and another man had come and had written two words before it and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. And the writing remains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silent but for the wind and the things that creak as it blows, the only message of this deserted house, is this mighty record, this rare line of history, ill-written: "Lost by the 156th Wurtemburgers, retaken by the Bermondsey Butterflies."

Two men wrote that sentence between them. And, as with Homer, no one knows who they were. And; like Homer, their words were epic.

On An Old Battle-Field

I entered an old battle-field through a garden gate, a pale green gate by the. Bapaume-Arras road. The cheerful green attracted me in the deeps of the desolation as an emerald might in a dust-bin. I entered through that homely garden gate, it had no hinges, no pillars, it lolled on a heap of stone: I came to it from the road; this alone was not battle-field; the road alone was made and tended and kept; all the rest was battle-field, as far as the eye could see. Over a large whitish heap lay a Virginia creeper, turning a dull crimson. And the presence of this creeper mourning there in the waste showed unmistakably that the heap had been a house. All the living things were gone that had called this white heap Home: the father would be fighting, somewhere; the children would have fled, if there had been time; the dog would have gone with them, or perhaps, if there was not time, he served other masters; the cat would have made a lair for herself and stalked mice at night through the trenches. All the live things that we ever consider were gone; the creeper alone remained, the only mourner, clinging to fallen stones that had supported it once.

And I knew by its presence here there had been a house. And by the texture or composition of the ruin all round I saw that a village had stood there. There are calamities one does not contemplate, when one thinks of time and change. Death, passing away, even ruin, are all the human lot; but one contemplates ruin as brought by kindly ages, coming slowly at last, with lichen and ivy and moss, its harsher aspects all hidden with green, coming with dignity and in due season. Thus our works should pass away; our worst fears contemplated no more than this.

But here in a single day, perhaps in a moment with one discharge from a battery, all the little things that one family cared for, their house, their garden; and the garden paths, and then the village and the road through the village, and the old landmarks that the old people remembered, and countless treasured things, were all turned into rubbish.

And these things that one did not contemplate, have happened for hundreds of miles, with such disaster vast plains and hills are covered, because of the German war.

Deep wells, old cellars, battered trenches and dug-outs, lie in the rubbish and weeds under the intricate wreckage of peace and war. It will be a bad place years hence for wanderers lost at night.

When the village went, trenches came; and, in the same storm that had crumbled the village, the trenches withered too; shells still thump on to the north, but peace and war alike have deserted the village. Grass has begun to return over torn earth on edges of trenches. Abundant wire rusts away by its twisted stakes of steel. Not a path of old, not a lane nor a doorway there, but is barred and cut off by wire; and the wire in its turn has been cut by shells and lies in ungathered swathes. A pair of wheels moulders amongst weeds, and may be of peace or of war, it is too broken down for anyone to say. A great bar of iron lies cracked across as though one of the elder giants had handled it carelessly. Another mound near by, with an old green beam sticking out of it, was also once a house. A trench runs by it. A German bomb with its wooden handle, 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 equally are scattered dirtily in the mud, and common weeds overpower them; it is not ruin but rubbish that covers the ground here and spreads its untidy flood for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

A band plays in Arras, to the north and east the shells go thumping on.

The very origins of things are in doubt, so much is jumbled together. It is as hard to make out just where the trenches ran, and which was No-Man's-Land, as it is to tell the houses from garden and orchard and road: the rubbish covers all. It is as though the ancient forces of Chaos had come back from the abyss to fight against order and man, and Chaos had won. So lies this village of France.

As I left it a rat, with something in its mouth, holding its head high, ran right across the village.

The Real Thing

Once at manoeuvres as the Prussian Crown Prince charged at the head of his regiment, as sabres gleamed, plumes streamed, and hooves thundered behind him, he is reported to have said to one that galloped near him: "Ah, if only this were the real thing!"

One need not doubt that the report is true. So a young man might feel as he led his regiment of cavalry, for the scene would fire the blood; all those young men and fine uniforms and good horses, all coming on behind, everything streaming that could float on the air, everything jingling then which could ever make a sound, a bright sky no doubt over the uniforms, a good fresh wind for men and horses to gulp; and behind, the clinking and jingling, the long roll of hooves thundering. Such a scene might well stir emotions to sigh for the splendours of battle.

This is one side of war. Mutilation and death are another; misery, cold and dirt; pain, and the intense loneliness of men left behind by armies, with much to think of; no hope, and a day or two to live. But we understand that glory covers that.

There is yet a third side.

I came to Albert when the fight was far from it: only at night you saw any signs of war, when clouds flashed now and then and curious rockets peered. Albert robbed of peace was deserted even by war.

I will not say that Albert was devastated or desolate, for these long words have different interpretations and may easily be exaggerated. A German agent might say to you, "Devastated is rather a strong word, and desolate is a matter of opinion." And so you might never know what Albert is like.

I will tell you what I saw.

Albert was a large town. I will not write of all of it.

I sat down near a railway bridge at the edge of the town; I think I was near the station; and small houses had stood there with little gardens; such as porters and other railway folk would have lived in. I sat down on the railway and looked at one of these houses, for it had clearly been a house. It was at the back of it that most remained, in what must have been a garden. A girder torn up