village, and hear English songs, but no one who has not seen it can
imagine the country in which the trenches lie, unless he bear a desert
clearly in mind, a desert that has moved from its place on the map by
some enchantment of wizardry, and come down on a smiling country.
Would it not be glorious to be a Kaiser and be able to do things like
that?

Past all manner of men, past no trees, no hedges, no fields, but only
one field from skyline to skyline that has been harrowed by war, one
goes with companions that this event in our history has drawn from all
parts of the earth. On that road you may hear all in one walk where is
the best place to get lunch in the City; you may hear how they laid a
drag for some Irish pack, and what the Master said; you may hear a
farmer lamenting over the harm that rhinoceroses do to his coffee
crop; you may hear Shakespeare quoted and La vie Parisienne.

In the village you see a lot of German orders, with their silly notes
of exclamation after them, written up on notice boards among the
ruins. Ruins and German orders. That turning movement of Von Kluck's
near Paris in 1914 was a mistake. Had he not done it we might have had
ruins and German orders everywhere. And yet Von Kluck may comfort
himself with the thought that it is not by his mistakes that Destiny
shapes the world: such a nightmare as a world-wide German domination
can have had no place amongst the scheme of things.

Beyond the village the batteries are thick. A great howitzer near the
road lifts its huge muzzle slowly, fires and goes down again, and
lifts again and fires. It is as though Polyphemus had lifted his huge
shape slowly, leisurely, from the hillside where he was sitting, and
hurled the mountain top, and sat down again. If he is firing pretty