Michaelmas daisies, deep mauve and pale mauve, and a bright yellow
flower beside them, show where a garden used to stand near by. Above
the dug-out a patch of jagged earth shows in three clear layers under
the weeds: four inches of grey road metal, imported, for all this
country is chalk and clay; two inches of flint below it, and under
that an inch of a bright red stone. We are looking then at a road--a
road through a village trodden by men and women, and the hooves of
horses and familiar modern things, a road so buried, so shattered, so
overgrown, showing by chance an edge in the midst of the wilderness,
that I could seem rather to have discovered the track of the Dinosaur
in prehistoric clays than the highway, of a little village that only
five years ago was full of human faults and joys and songs and tiny
tears. Down that road before the plans, of the Kaiser began to fumble
with the earth, down that road--but it is useless to look back, we
are too far away from five years ago, too far away from thousands of
ordinary things, that never seemed as though they would ever peer at
us over chasms of time, out of another age, utterly far off,
irrevocably removed from our ways and days. They are gone, those
times, gone like the Dinosaur; gone with bows and arrows and the old
knightlier days. No splendour marks their sunset where I sit, no
dignity of houses, or derelict engines of war, mined all equally are
scattered dirtily in the mud, and common weeds overpower them; it is
not ruin but rubbish that covers the ground here and spreads its
untidy flood for hundreds and hundreds of miles.

A band plays in Arras, to the north and east the shells go thumping
on.

The very origins of things are in doubt, so much is jumbled together.
It is as hard to make out just where the trenches ran, and which was