only meddled with it; and his folly has brought misery to millions,
and there lies his broken dream on the broken earth. He will never
take Paris now. He will never be crowned at Versailles as Emperor of
Europe; and after that, most secret dream of all, did not the Cæsars
proclaim themselves divine? Was it not whispered among Macedonian
courtiers that Alexander was the child of God? And was the
Hohenzollern less than these?

What might not force accomplish? All gone now, that dream and the
Hohenzollern line broken. A maniacal dream and broken farms all mixed
up together: they make a pretty nightmare and the clouds still gleam
at night with the flashes of shells, and the sky is still troubled by
day with uncouth balloons and the black bursts of the German shells
and the white of our anti-aircraft.

And below there lies this wonderful waste land where no girls sing,
and where no birds come but starlings; where no hedgerows stand, and
no lanes with wild roses, and where no pathways run through fields of
wheat, and there are no fields at all and no farms and no farmers; and
two haystacks stand on a hill I know, undestroyed in the desolation,
and nobody touches them for they know the Germans too well; and the
tops have been blown off hills down to the chalk. And men say of this
place that it is Pozières and of that place that it is Ginchy; nothing
remains to show that hamlets stood there at all, and a brown, brown
weed grows over it all for ever; and a mighty spirit has arisen in
man, and no one bows to the War Lord though many die. And Liberty is
she who sang her songs of old, and is fair as she ever was, when men
see her in visions, at night in No Man's Land when they have the
strength to crawl in: still she walks of a night in Pozières and in
Ginchy.