road, or dreamed that lanes he knew could be so foundered and merged,
in that mournful desolate moor.

Evening was filling fast, still he kept on. It was the time when the
cornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turn
grey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit their
innumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation:
and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound of
iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound that
would haunt the waste for ever.

And evening settled down, a huge grey canvas waiting for sombre
pictures; a setting for all the dark tales of the world, haunted
forever a grizzly place was haunted ever, in any century, in any
land; but not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and
half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things
huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions,
under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was
villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two
Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering for
dominion of the world.

The cold wind blew over the blasted heath and bits of broken iron
flapped on and on.

And now the traveller hurried, for night was falling, and such a
night as three witches might have brewed in a cauldron. He went on
eagerly but with infinite sadness. Over the sky-line strange rockets
went up from the war, peered oddly over the earth and went down
again. Very far off a few soldiers lit a little fire of their own.