night winds mourning in No Man's Land seemed to sing for him alone.

It was surely the hour of the swede. For him, it seemed, was No Man's Land. And there I met him one night by the light of a German rocket and brought him back to our company to cook.

Weeds and Wire

Things had been happening. Divisions were moving. There had been, there was going to be, a stunt. A battalion marched over the hill and sat down by the road. They had left the trenches three days march to the north and had come to a new country. The officers pulled their maps out; a mild breeze fluttered them; yesterday had been winter and to-day was spring; but spring in a desolation so complete and far-reaching that you only knew of it by that little wind. It was early March by the calendar, but the wind was blowing out of the gates of April. A platoon commander, feeling that mild wind blowing, forgot his map and began to whistle a tune that suddenly came to him out of the past with the wind. Out of the past it blew and out of the South, a merry vernal tune of a Southern people. Perhaps only one of those that noticed the tune had ever heard it before. An officer sitting near had heard it sung; it reminded him of a holiday long ago in the South.

``Where did you hear that tune?'' he asked the platoon commander.

``Oh, the hell of a long way from here,'' the platoon commander said.

He did not remember quite where it was he had heard it, but he remembered a sunny day in France and a hill all dark with pine woods, and a man coming down at evening out of the woods, and down the slope to the village, singing this song. Between the village and the slope there were orchards in blossom. So that he came with his song for hundreds of yards through orchards. ``The hell of a way from here,'' he said.

For a long while then they sat silent.

``It mightn't have been so very far from here,'' said the platoon commander. ``It was in France, now I come to think of it. But it was a lovely part of France, all woods and orchards. Nothing like this, thank God.'' And he glanced with a tired look at the unutterable desolation.

``Where was it?'' said the other.

``In Picardy,'' he said.

``Aren't we in Picardy now?'' said his friend.

``Are we?'' he said.

``I don't know. The maps don't call it Picardy.''

``It was a fine place, anyway,'' the platoon commander said. ``There seemed always to be a wonderful light on the hills. A kind of short grass grew on them, and it shone in the sun at evening. There were black woods above them. A man used to come out of them singing at evening.''

He looked wearily round at the brown desolation of weeds. As far as the two officers could see there was nothing but brown weeds and bits of brown barbed wire. He turned from the desolate scene back to his reminiscences.

``He came singing through the orchards into the village,'' he said. ``A quaint old place with queer gables, called Ville-en-Bois.''

``Do you know where we are?'' said the other.

``No, said the platoon commander.''

``I thought not,'' he said. ``Hadn't you better take a look at the map?''

``I suppose so,'' said the platoon commander, and he smoothed out his map and wearily got to the business of finding out where he was.

``Good Lord!'' he said. ``Ville-en-Bois!''

Spring in England and Flanders

Very soon the earliest primroses will be coming out in woods wherever they have been sheltered from the north. They will grow bolder as the days go by, and spread and come all down the slopes of sunny hills. Then the anemones will come, like a shy pale people, one of the tribes of the elves, who dare not leave the innermost deeps of the wood: in those days all the trees will be in leaf, the bluebells will follow, and certain fortunate woods will shelter such myriads of them that the bright fresh green of the beech trees will flash between two blues, the blue of the sky and the deeper blue of the bluebells. Later the violets come, and such a time as this is the perfect time to see England: when the cuckoo is heard and he surprises his hearers; when evenings are lengthening out and the bat is abroad again; and all the flowers are out and all the birds sing. At such a time not only Nature smiles but our quiet villages and grave old spires wake up from winter in the mellow air and wear their centuries lightly. At such a time you might come just at evening on one of those old villages in a valley and find it in the mood to tell you the secret of the ages that it hid and treasured there before the Normans came. Who knows? For they are very old, very wise, very friendly; they might speak to you one warm evening. If you went to them after great suffering they might speak to you; after nights and nights of shelling over in France, they might speak to you and you might hear them clearly.

It would be a long, long story that they would tell, all about the ages; and it would vary wonderfully little, much less perhaps than we think; and the repetitions rambling on and on in the evening, as the old belfry spoke and the cottages gathered below it, might sound so soothing after the boom of shells that perhaps you would nearly sleep. And then with one's memory tired out by the war one might never remember the long story they told, when the belfry and the brown-roofed houses all murmured at evening, might never remember even that they had spoken all through that warm spring and evening. We may have heard them speak and forgotten that they have spoken. Who knows? We are at war, and see so many strange things: some we must forget, some we must remember; and we cannot choose which.

To turn from Kent to Flanders is to turn to a time of mourning through all seasons alike. Spring there brings out no leaf on myriad oaks, nor the haze of green that floats like a halo above the heads of the birch trees, that stand with their fairylike trunks haunting the deeps of the woods. For miles and miles and miles summer ripens no crops, leads out no maidens laughing in the moonlight, and brings no harvest home. When Autumn looks on orchards in all that region of mourning he looks upon barren trees that will never blossom again. Winter drives in no sturdy farmers at evening to sit before cheery fires, families meet not at Christmas, and the bells are dumb in belfries; for all by which a man might remember his home has been utterly swept away: has been swept away to make a maniacal dancing ground on which a murderous people dance to their death led by a shallow, clever, callous, imperial clown.

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.

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