up a dead weed. Weeds, grass and tumbled earth were all about him. It
would be no better when he went on. Still he went on. A flower or two
peeped up among the weeds. He stood up and looked at the landscape
and drew no hope from that, the shattered trunk of a stricken tree
leered near him, white trenches scarred the hillside. He followed an
old trench through a hedge of elder, passed under more wire, by a
great rusty shell that had not burst, passed by a dug-out where
something grey seemed to lie down at the bottom of many steps. Black
fungi grew near the entrance. He went on and on over shell-holes,
passing round them where they were deep, stepping into or over the
small ones. Little burrs clutched at him; he went rustling on, the
only sound in the waste but the clicking of shattered iron. Now he
was among nettles. He came by many small unnatural valleys. He passed
more trenches only guarded by fungi. While it was light he followed
little paths, marvelling who made them. Once he got into a trench.
Dandelions leaned across it as though to bar his way, believing man
to have gone and to have no right to return. Weeds thronged, in
thousands here. It was the day of the weeds. It was only they that
seemed to triumph in those fields deserted of man. He passed on down
the trench and never knew whose trench it once had been. Frightful
shells had smashed it here and there, and had twisted iron as though
round gigantic fingers that had twiddled it idly a moment and let it
drop to lie in the rain for ever. He passed more dug-outs and black
fungi, watching them; and then he left the trench, going straight on
over the open: again dead grasses hissed about his feet, sometimes
small wire sang faintly He passed through a belt of nettles and
thence to dead grass again. And now the light of the afternoon was
beginning to dwindle away. He had intended to reach his journey's end
by daylight, for he was past the time of life when one wanders after
dark, but he had not contemplated the difficulty of walking over that