There they dance to their doom till their feet shall find the precipice that was prepared for them on the day that they planned the evil things they have done.

The Nightmare Countries

There are certain lands in the darker dreams of poetry that stand out in the memory of generations.  There is for instance Poe’s ``Dark tarn of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir’’; there are some queer twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two lines of Swinburne: 

By the tideless dolorous inland sea
In a land of sand and ruin and gold

are as haunting as any.  There are in literature certain regions of gloom, so splendid that whenever you come on them they leave in the mind a sort of nightmare country which one’s thoughts revisit on hearing the lines quoted.

It is pleasant to picture such countries sometimes when sitting before the fire.  It is pleasant because you can banish them by the closing of a book; a puff of smoke from a pipe will hide them altogether, and back come the pleasant, wholesome, familiar things.  But in France they are there always.  In France the nightmare countries stand all night in the starlight; dawn comes and they still are there.  The dead are buried out of sight and others take their places among men; but the lost lands lie unburied gazing up at the winds; and the lost woods stand like skeletons all grotesque in the solitude; the very seasons have fled from them.  The very seasons have fled; so that if you look up to see whether summer has turned to autumn, or if autumn has turned to winter yet, nothing remains to show you.  It is like the eccentric dream of some strange man, very arresting and mysterious, but lacking certain things that should be there before you can recognize it as earthly.  It is a mad, mad landscape.  There are miles and miles and miles of it.  It is the biggest thing man has done.  It looks as though man in his pride, with all his clever inventions, had made for himself a sorry attempt at creation.

Indeed when we trace it all back to its origin we find at the beginning of this unhappy story a man who was only an emperor and wished to be something more.  He would have ruled the world but has only meddled with it; and his folly has brought misery to millions, and there lies his broken dream on the broken earth.  He will never take Paris now.  He will never be crowned at Versailles as Emperor of Europe; and after that, most secret dream of all, did not the Cæsars proclaim themselves divine?  Was it not whispered among Macedonian courtiers that Alexander was the child of God?  And was the Hohenzollern less than these?

What might not force accomplish?  All gone now, that dream and the Hohenzollern line broken.  A maniacal dream and broken farms all mixed up together:  they make a pretty nightmare and the clouds still gleam at night with the flashes of shells, and the sky is still troubled by day with uncouth balloons and the black bursts of the German shells and the white of our anti-aircraft.