And below there lies this wonderful waste land where no girls sing, and where no birds come but starlings; where no hedgerows stand, and no lanes with wild roses, and where no pathways run through fields of wheat, and there are no fields at all and no farms and no farmers; and two haystacks stand on a hill I know, undestroyed in the desolation, and nobody touches them for they know the Germans too well; and the tops have been blown off hills down to the chalk.  And men say of this place that it is Pozières and of that place that it is Ginchy; nothing remains to show that hamlets stood there at all, and a brown, brown weed grows over it all for ever; and a mighty spirit has arisen in man, and no one bows to the War Lord though many die.  And Liberty is she who sang her songs of old, and is fair as she ever was, when men see her in visions, at night in No Man’s Land when they have the strength to crawl in:  still she walks of a night in Pozières and in Ginchy.

A fanciful man once called himself the Emperor of the Sahara:  the German Kaiser has stolen into a fair land and holds with weakening hands a land of craters and weed, and wire and wild cabbages and old German bones.

Spring and the Kaiser

While all the world is waiting for Spring there lie great spaces in one of the pleasantest lands to which Spring cannot come.

Pear trees and cherry and orchards flash over other lands, blossoming as abundantly as though their wonder were new, with a beauty as fresh and surprising as though nothing like it before had ever adorned countless centuries.  Now with the larch and soon with the beech trees and hazel, a bright green blazes forth to illumine the year.  The slopes are covered with violets.  Those who have gardens are beginning to be proud of them and to point them out to their neighbours.  Almond and peach in blossom peep over old brick walls.  The land dreams of summer all in the youth of the year.

But better than all this the Germans have found war.  The simple content of a people at peace in pleasant countries counted for nothing with them.  Their Kaiser prepared for war, made speeches about war, and, when he was ready, made war.  And now the hills that should be covered with violets are full of murderous holes, and the holes are half full of empty meat tins, and the garden walls have gone and the gardens with them, and there are no woods left to shelter anemones.  Boundless masses of brown barbed wire straggle over the landscape.  All the orchards there are cut down out of ruthless spite to hurt France whom they cannot conquer.  All the little trees that grow near gardens are gone, aspen, laburnum and lilac.  It is like this for hundreds of miles.  Hundreds of ruined towns gaze at it with vacant windows and see a land from which even Spring is banished.  And not a ruined house in all the hundred towns but mourns for some one, man, woman or child; for the Germans make war equally on all in the land where Spring comes no more.