the trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceased altogether, and suddenly we saw albert in the wood of the ghosts of murdered trees, all grey and deserted.
descending into albert past trees in their agony we came all at once on the houses. you did not see them far off as in other cities; we came on them all at once as you come on a corpse in the grass.
we stopped and stood by a house that was covered with plaster marked off to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, the slates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel. near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway bridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as though it had gone through butter. and beside the hand-rail lay one of the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there upon some flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it had been a slender cane that someone had shoved too hard into the earth.
there had been a force abroad in albert that could do these things, an iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical contrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a moment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal.
when such a force was abroad what chance had man? it had come down upon albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped and withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and in that attitude i found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcome by disaster.
pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins, fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which they had destroyed. cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a london shop, but to-day in albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap knife sticking up from a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is long out of fashion.
the stale smell of war arose from the desolation.
a british helmet dinted in like an old bowler, but tragic not absurd, lay near a barrel and a teapot.
on a wall that rose above a heap of dirty and smashed rafters was written in red paint kompe i.m.b.k. 184. the red paint had dripped down the wall from every letter. verily we stood upon the scene of the murder.
opposite those red letters across the road was a house with traces of a pleasant ornament below the sills of the windows, a design of grapes and vine. someone had stuck up a wooden boot on a peg outside the door.
perhaps the cheery design on the wall attracted me. i entered the house and looked round.
a chunk of shell lay on the floor, and a little decanter, only chipped at the lip, and part of a haversack of horse-skin. there were pretty tiles on the floor, but dry mud buried them deep: it was like the age-old dirt that gathers in temples in africa. a man's waistcoat lay on the mud and part of a woman's stays: the waistcoat was black and was probably kept for sundays. that was all that there was to see on the ground floor, no more flotsam than that had come down to these days from peace.
a forlorn stairway tried still to wind upstairs. it went up out of a corner of the room. it seemed still to believe that there was an upper storey, still to feel that this was a house, there seemed a hope in the twists of that battered staircase that men would yet come again and seek sleep at evening by way of those broken steps; the hand-rail and the banisters streamed down from the top, a woman's dress lolled down from the upper room above those aimless steps, the laths of the ceiling gaped, the plaster was gone; of all the hopes men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway's posture that ever a family would come home there again or tread those steps once more. and, if in some far country one should hope, who has not seen albert, out of compassion for these poor people of france, that where a staircase still remains there may be enough of a house to shelter those who called it home again, i will tell one thing more: there blew inside that house the same wind that blew outside, the wind that wandered free over miles of plains wandered unchecked through that house; there was no indoors or outdoors any more.
and on the wall of the room in which i stood, someone had proudly written his regiment's name, the 156th wurtemburgers. it was written in chalk; and another man had come and had written two words before it and had recorded the name of his own regiment too. and the writing remains after these two men are gone, and the lonely house is silent but for the wind and the things that creak as it blows, the only message of this deserted house, is this mighty record, this rare line of history, ill-written: "lost by the 156th wurtemburgers, retaken by the bermondsey butterflies."
two men wrote that sentence between them. and, as with homer, no one knows who they were. and; like homer, their words were epic.
