the Prussian system together, having hammered hard for four mortal
years to burst it asunder. Or he may think exactly the opposite;
it makes no difference to the larger fact I have in mind.
A man may think it simply topsy-turvy, as I do, that we should
clear the Turks out of Turkey, but leave them in Constantinople.
For that is driving the barbarians from their own rude tillage
and pasturage, and giving up to them our own European and Christian city;
it is as if the Romans annexed Parthia but surrendered Rome.
But he may think exactly the opposite; and the larger and simpler
truth will still be there. It was that the weeds and wild
things had been everywhere breaking into our boundaries,
climbing over the northern wall or crawling through the eastern gate,
so that the city would soon have been swallowed in the jungle.
And whether the lines had been redrawn logically or loosely,
or particular things cleared with consistency or caprice, a line
has been drawn somewhere and a clearance has been made somehow.
The ancient plan of our city has been saved; a city at least
capable of containing citizens. I felt this in the chance relics
of the war itself; I felt it twenty times more in those older relics
which even the war had never touched at all; I felt the change
as much in the changeless East as in the ever-changing West.
I felt it when I crossed another great square in Paris to look
at a certain statue, which I had last seen hung with crape
and such garlands as we give the dead; but on whose plain
pedestal nothing now is left but the single word "Strasbourg."
I felt it when I saw words merely scribbled with a pencil on a wall
in a poor street in Brindisi; _Italia vittoriosa_. But I felt it
as much or even more in things infinitely more ancient and remote;
in those monuments like mountains that still seem to look down
upon all modern things. For these things were more than a trophy