There is yet a third side.

I came to Albert when the fight was far from it:  only at night you saw any signs of war, when clouds flashed now and then and curious rockets peered.  Albert robbed of peace was deserted even by war.

I will not say that Albert was devastated or desolate, for these long words have different interpretations and may easily be exaggerated.  A German agent might say to you, “Devastated is rather a strong word, and desolate is a matter of opinion.”  And so you might never know what Albert is like.

I will tell you what I saw.

Albert was a large town.  I will not write of all of it.

I sat down near a railway bridge at the edge of the town; I think I was near the station; and small houses had stood there with little gardens; such as porters and other railway folk would have lived in.  I sat down on the railway and looked at one of these houses, for it had clearly been a house.  It was at the back of it that most remained, in what must have been a garden.  A girder torn up like a pack of cards lay on the leg of a table amongst a brick wall by an apple-tree.

Lower down in the heap was the frame-work of a large four-poster bed; through it all a vine came up quite green and still alive; and at the edge of the heap lay a doll’s green pram.  Small though the house had been there was evidence in that heap of some prosperity in more than one generation.  For the four-poster bed had been a fine one, good work in sound old timber, before the bits in the girder had driven it into the wall; and the green pram must have been the dowry of no ordinary, doll, but one with the best yellow curls whose blue eyes could move.  One blue columbine close by mourned alone for the garden.

The wall and the vine and the bed and the girder lay in an orchard, and some of the apple-trees were standing yet, though the orchard had been terribly wrecked by shell fire.  All that still stood were dead.  Some stood upon the very edge of craters; their leaves and twigs and bark had been stripped by one blast in a moment; and they had tottered, with stunted, black, gesticulating branches; and so they stood today.

The curls of a mattress lay on the ground, clipped once from a horse’s mane.

After looking for some while across the orchard one suddenly noticed that the cathedral had stood on the other side.  It was draped, when we saw it closer, as with a huge grey cloak, the lead of its roof having come down and covered it.

Near the house of that petted doll (as I came to think of it) a road ran by on the other side of the railway.  Great shells had dropped along it with terrible regularity.  You could imagine Death striding down it with exact five-yard paces, on his own day, claiming his own.  As I stood on the road something whispered behind me; and I saw, stirring round with the wind, in one of those footsteps of Death, a double page of a book open at Chapter II:  and Chapter II was headed