IN LORRAINE AND THE VOSGES

NANCY, May 13th, 1915





Beside me, on my writing-table, stands a bunch of peonies, the jolly
round-faced pink peonies of the village garden. They were picked
this afternoon in the garden of a ruined house at Gerbeviller--a
house so calcined and convulsed that, for epithets dire enough to
fit it, one would have to borrow from a Hebrew prophet gloating over
the fall of a city of idolaters.

Since leaving Paris yesterday we have passed through streets and
streets of such murdered houses, through town after town spread out
in its last writhings; and before the black holes that were homes,
along the edge of the chasms that were streets, everywhere we have
seen flowers and vegetables springing up in freshly raked and
watered gardens. My pink peonies were not introduced to point the
stale allegory of unconscious Nature veiling Man's havoc: they are
put on my first page as a symbol of conscious human energy coming
back to replant and rebuild the wilderness...

Last March, in the Argonne, the towns we passed through seemed quite
dead; but yesterday new life was budding everywhere. We were