s, no less golden to them,
no less magical even, though too little to stir the pen of History,
busy with batteries and imperial dooms. So that to these, whatever
others may write, the twentieth-century will not be the age of
strategy, but will only seem to have been those fourteen lost quiet
summers whose fruits lie under the plaster.

That layer of plaster and brick-dust lies on the age that has gone,
as final, as fatal, as the layer of flints that covers the top of the
chalk and marks the end of an epoch and some unknown geologic
catastrophe.

It is only by the little things in Bethune, lying where they were
left, that one can trace at all what kind of house each was, or guess
at the people who dwelt in it. It is only by a potato growing where
Pavement was, and flowering vigorously under a vacant window, that
one can guess that the battered, house beside it was once a
fruiterer's shop, whence the potato rolled away when man fell on evil
days, and found the street, no longer harsh and unfriendly; but soft
and fertile like the primal waste, and took root and throve there as
its forbears throve before it in another continent before the coming
of man.

Across the street, in the dust of a stricken house, the implements of
his trade show where a carpenter lived when disaster came so
suddenly, quite good tools, some still upon shelves, some amongst
broken things that lie all over the floor. And further along the
street in which these things are someone has put up a great iron
shutter that was to protect his shop. It has a graceful border of
painted, irises all the way up each side. It might have been a
jeweller that would have had such a shutter. The shutter alone
remains standing straight upright, and the whole shop is gone.

And just here the shaken street ends and all the streets end
together. The rest is a mound of white stones and pieces of bricks
with low, leaning walls surrounding it, and the halves of hollow
houses; and eyeing it round a comer, one old tower of the cathedral,
as though still gazing over its congregation of houses, a mined,
melancholy watcher. Over the bricks lie tracks, but no more streets.
It is about the middle of the town, a hawk goes over, calling as
though he flew over the waste, and as though the waste were his. The
breeze that carries him opens old shutters and flaps them to again.
Old, useless hinges moan; wall-paper whispers. Three French soldiers
trying to find their homes walk over t