Those that knew where the battalion was that the wandering officer looked for were not many; these were reserved and spoke like one that has a murder on his conscience, not freely and openly: for of one thing no one speaks in France, and that is the exact position of a unit. One may wave one's hand vaguely eastwards and say "Over there,", but to name a village and the people that occupy it is to offend against the silence that in these days broods over France, the solemn hush befitting so vast a tragedy.
And in the end it seemed better to that officer to obey the R.T.O. and to go by his train to Brie that left in the morning, and that question settled, there remained only food and sleep.
Down in the basement of the big house with a roof there was a kitchen, in fact there was everything that a house should have; and the more that one saw of simple household things, tables, chairs, the fire in the kitchen, pieces of carpet, floors, ceilings, and even windows, the more one wondered; it did not seem natural in Peronne.
Picture to yourself a fine drawing-room with high ornamental walls and all the air about it of dignity, peace and ease, that were so recently gone; only just, as it might have been, stepped through the double doorway; skirts, as it were, of ladies only just trailed out of sight; and then turn in fancy to that great town streaming with moonlight, full of the mystery that moonlight always brings, but without the light of it; all black, dark as caverns of earth where no light ever came, blacker for the moonlight than if no moon were there; sombre, mourning and accursed, each house in the great streets sheltering darkness amongst its windowless walls; as though it nursed disaster, having no other children left, and would not let the moon peer in on its grief or see the monstrous orphan that it fondled.
In the old drawing-room with twenty others, the wandering officer lay down to sleep on the floor, and thought of old wars that came to the cities of France a long while ago. To just such houses as this, he thought, men must have come before and gone on next day to fight in other centuries; it seemed to him that it must have been more romantic then. Who knows?
He had a bit of carpet to lie on. A few more officers came in in the early part of the night, and talked a little and lay down. A few candles were stuck on tables here and there. Midnight would have struck from the towers had any clock been left to strike in Peronne. Still talk went on in low voices here and there. The candles burned low and were fewer. Big shadows floated along those old high walls. Then the talk ceased and everyone was stilclass="underline" nothing stirred but the shadows. An officer muttered in sleep of things far thence, and was silent. Far away shells thumped faintly. The shadows, left to themselves, went round and round the room, searching in every corner for something that was lost. Over walls and ceiling they went and could not find it. The last candle was failing. It flared and guttered. The shadows raced over the room from comer to corner. Lost, and they could not find it. They hurried desperately in those last few moments. Great shadows searching for some little thing. In the smallest nook they sought for it. Then the last candle died. As the flame went up with the smoke from the fallen wick all the great shadows turned and mournfully trailed away.
The Homes Of Arras
As you come to Arras by the western road, by the red ramparts and the Spanish gate, Arras looks like a king. With such a dignity as clings to the ancient gateway so might a king be crowned; with such a sweep of dull red as the old ramparts show, so might he be robed; but a dead king with crowned skull. For the ways of Arras are empty but for brown soldiers, and her houses are bare as bones.
Arras sleeps profoundly, roofless, windowless, carpetless; Arras sleeps as a skeleton sleeps, with all the dignity of former days about it, but the life that stirs in its streets is not the old city's life, the old city is murdered. I came to Arras and went down a street, and saw back gardens glinting through the bare ribs of the houses. Garden after garden shone, so far as it could, though it was in October and after four years of war; but what was left of those gardens shining there in the sun was like sad faces trying to smile after many disasters.
I came to a great wall that no shell had breached. A cascade of scarlet creeper poured over it, as though on the other side some serene garden grew, where no disaster came, tended by girls who had never heard of war, walking untrodden paths. It was not so. But one's fancy, weary of ruin, readily turns to such scenes wherever facts are hidden, though but by a tottering wall, led by a few bright leaves or the glimpse of a flower.
But not for any fancy of mine must you picture ruin any more as something graced with splendour, or as it were an argosy reaching the shores of our day laden with grandeur and dignity out of antiquity. Ruin to-day is not covered with ivy, and has no curious architecture or strange secrets of history, and is not beautiful or romantic at all. It has no tale to tell of old civilizations, not otherwise known, told of by few grey stones. Ruin to-day is destruction and sorrow and debt and loss, come down untidily upon modern homes and cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the guardian and the chronicle of ages that we should otherwise forget: ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has ceased to be still green in our memory. Quite ordinary wardrobes in unseemly attitudes gape out from bedrooms whose front walls are gone, in houses whose most inner design shows unconcealed to the cold gaze of the street. The rooms have neither mystery nor adornment. Burst mattresses loll down from bedraggled beds. No one has come to tidy them up for years. And roofs have slanted down as low as the first floor.
I saw a green door ajar in an upper room: the whole of the front wall of the house was gone: the door partly opened oddly on to a little staircase, whose steps one could just see, that one wondered whither it went. The door seemed to beckon and beckon to some lost room, but if one could ever have got there, up through that shattered house, and if the steps of that little staircase would bear, so that one came to, the room that is hidden away at the top, yet there could only be silence and spiders there, and broken plaster and the dust of calamity; it is only to memories that the green door beckons; nothing remains.
And some day they may come to Arras to see the romance of war, to see where the shells struck and to pick up pieces of iron. It is not this that is romantic, not Mars, but poor, limping Peace. It is what is left that appeals to you, with pathos and infinite charm; little desolate gardens that no one has tended for years, wall-paper left in forlorn rooms when all else is Scattered, old toys buried in rubbish, old steps untrodden on inaccessible landings: it is what is left that appeals to you, what remains of old peaceful things. The great guns throb on, all round is the panoply of war, if panoply be the right word for this vast disaster that is known to Arras as innumerable separate sorrows; but it is not to this great event that-the sympathy turns in Arras, nor to its thunder and show, nor the trappings of it, guns lorries, and fragments of shells: it is to the voiceless, deserted inanimate things, so greatly wronged, that all the heart goes out: floors fallen in festoons, windows that seem to be wailing, roofs as though crazed with grief and then petrified in their craziness; railings, lamp-posts, sticks, all hit, nothing spared by that frenzied iron: the very earth clawed and-torn: it is what is left that appeals to you.