the wind, with its unpromising sounds from the wide
and empty desert places! What does any of these old books know about me,
in the midst of those portents of a new age? We are all outward bound,
and this is the first night of a long voyage, its port unknown.

Even my bookshelves seem strange to-night. They look remarkably like a
library I saw once in a house in Richbourg S. Vaast, which, you may
remember, was a village near Neuve Chapelle. Those French volumes also
survived from circumstances that had passed. They were litter. They had
been left behind. I doubted whether, if I tried, I could touch them. They
were not within my time. That was on a day more than three years ago--it
was July, 1915--and Richbourg had then only just left this world. There
was a road without a sign of life; not a movement, except in one house.
The front of that house had gone, exposing the hollow inside, the
collapsed floors and hanging beams, and showing also a doll with a
foolish smirk caught in a wire and dangling from a rafter. The doll
danced in hysteric merriment whenever hidden guns were fired. That was
the only movement in Richbourg S. Vaast, and the guns made the only
sound. I was a survivor from the past, venturing at peril among the
wreckage and hardly remembered relics of what used to be familiar.
Richbourg was possessed by the power which had overwhelmed it, and which
was re-forming it in a changing world. To what was the world changing?
There was no clue, except the oppression of my mind, the shock of the
guns, and the ecstatic mockery of mirth over ruin by that little idiot
doll.

Beyond the sloughing and leprous tower of Richbourg Church, where the
ancient dead in the graveyard had been brought to light again, there was
a house which seemed in being. I entered it, for I was told by a soldier
companion that from a displaced tile in its roof I might see La Bassee. I
looked through that gap, and saw La Bassee. It was very near. It was a
terracotta smudge. It might have been a brickfield. But it was the
Enemy.

What I chiefly remember to-day is only the floor of that upper room from
which, through a gap in its wall, I saw the ambush of the enemy. On the
floor were scattered, mixed with lumps of plaster, a child's alphabetical
blocks. A shoe of the child was among them. There was a window where we
dared not show ourselves, though the day was fair without, and by it was
an old bureau, open, with its pad of blotting-paper, and so