A meadow-sweet had come into that greenhouse and dwelt there in that abode of fine tropical flowers, and one night an elder tree had entered and is now as high as the house, and at the end of the greenhouse grass has come in like a wave; for change and disaster are far-reaching and are only mirrored here.  This desolate garden and its mined house are a part of hundreds of thousands such, or millions.  Mathematics will give you no picture of what France has suffered.  If I tell you what one garden is like, one village, one house, one cathedral, after the German war has swept by, and if you read my words, I may help you perhaps to imagine more easily what France has suffered than if I spoke of millions.  I speak of one garden in Arras; and you might walk from there, south by east for weeks, and find no garden that has suffered less.

It is all weeds and elders.  An apple-tree rises out of a mass of nettles, but it is quite dead.  Wild rose-trees show here and there, or roses that have ran wild like the cats of No-Man’s-Land:  And once I saw a rose-bush that had been planted in a pot and still grew there, as though it still remembered man, but the flower-pot was shattered, like all the pots in that garden, and the rose grew wild as any in any hedge.

The ivy alone grows on over a mighty wall, and seems to care not.  The ivy alone seems not to mourn, but to have added the last four years to its growth as though they were ordinary years.  That corner of the wall alone whispers not of disaster, it only seems to tell of the passing of years, which makes the ivy strong, and for which in peace as in war there is no cure.  All the rest speaks of war, of war that comes to gardens, without banners or trumpets or splendour, and roots up everything, and turns round and smashes the house, and leaves it all desolate, and forgets and goes away.  And when the histories of the war are written, attacks and counter-attacks and the doom of Emperors, who will remember that garden?

Saddest of all, as it seemed to me watching the garden paths, were spiders’ webs that had been spun across them, so grey and stout and strong, fastened from weed to weed, with the spiders in their midst sitting in obvious ownership.  You knew then as you looked at those webs across all the paths in the garden that any that you might fancy walking the small paths still, were but grey ghosts gone from thence, no more than dreams, hopes and imaginings, something altogether weaker than spiders webs.

And the old wall of the garden that divides it from its neighbour, of solid stone and brick, over fifteen feet high, it is that mighty old wall that held the romance of the garden.  I do not tell the tale of that garden of Arras, for that is conjecture, and I only tell what I saw, in order that someone perhaps in some far country may know what happened in thousands and thousands of gardens because an Emperor sighed, and longed for the splendour of war.  The tale