the poplars are looking unkempt. It would be the young men who would
cut the branches of the poplars. They would cut them for some useful
thrifty purpose that I do not know; and then they would cut them
because they were always cut that way, as long ago as the times of the
old men's tales about France; but chiefly, I expect, because youth
likes to climb difficult trees; that is why they are clipped so very
high. And the trunks are all unkempt now.

We go on by many farms with their shapely red-roofed houses; they
stand there, having the air of the homes of an ancient people; they
would not be out of keeping with any romance that might come, or any
romance that has come in the long story of France, and the girls of
those red-roofed houses work all alone in the fields.

We pass by many willows and come to a great marsh. In a punt on some
open water an old man is angling. We come to fields again, and then to
a deep wood. France smiles about us in the open sunlight.

But towards evening we pass over the border of this pleasant country
into a tragical land of destruction and gloom. It is not only that
murder has walked here to and fro for years, until all the fields are
ominous with it, but the very fields themselves have been mutilated
until they are unlike fields, the woods have been shattered right down
to the anemones, and the houses have been piled in heaps of rubbish,
and the heaps of rubbish have been scattered by shells. We see no more
trees, no more houses, no more women, no cattle even now. We have come
to the abomination of desolation. And over it broods, and will
probably brood for ever, accursed by men and accursed by the very
fields, the hyena-like memory of the Kaiser, who has whitened so many
bones.