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 hand