he heart of us, and it was mocking us now by defiling in an
inhuman rage its own caricature of our appearance.

But there, lying in the road, was that corn-chandler's ledger. It was
the first understandable thing I had seen that day. I began to believe
these abandoned and silent ruins had lived and flourished, had once a
warm kindred life moving in their empty chambers; enclosed a
comfortable community, like placid Casterbridge. Men did stand here on
sunny market days, and sorted wheat in the hollows of their hands. And
with all that wide and hideous disaster of the Somme around it was
suddenly understood (as when an essential light at home, but a light
that has been casually valued, goes out, and leaves you to the dark)
that an elderly farmer, looking for the best seed corn in the
market-place, while his daughter the dairymaid is flirting with his
neighbour's son, are more to us than all the Importances and the Great
Ones who in all history till now have proudly and expertly tended their
culture of discords.

I don't know that I ever read a book with more interest than that
corn-chandler's ledger; though at one time, when it was merely a
commonplace record of the common life which circulated there,
testifying to its industry and the response of earth, it would have
been no matter to me. Not for such successes are our flags displayed
and our bells set pealing. It named customers at Thiepval, Martinpuich,
Courcelette, Combles, Longueval, Contalmaison, Pozieres, Guillemont,
Montauban. It was not easy to understand it, my knowledge of those
places being what it was. Those villages did not exist, except as
corruption in a land that was tumbled into waves of glistening clay
where the bodies of men were rotting disregarded like those of dogs
sprawled on a midden. My knowledge of that country, got with some
fatigue, anxiety, fright and on certain days dull contempt for the
worst that could happen, because it seemed that nothing could matter
any more, my idea of that country was such that the contrast of those
ledger accounts was uncanny and unbelievable. Yet amid all the misery
and horror of the Somme, with its shattering reminder of finality and
futility at every step whichever way you turned, that ledger in the
road, with none to read it, was the gospel promising that life should
rise again; the suggestion of a forgotten but surviving virtue which
would return, and cover the dread we knew, till a ploughman of the
future wo