August i6, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
^9 
The Desert Made by Germans 
By James Milne 
Two Streets in Arras 
THE German Michael has a wonderful sense of art in 
destruction, a positive genius for ruins as a picture 
of wantonness. He takes a craftsman's pride in 
the way he levels a farmhouse, or even a humble 
cottage. He overthrows a chateau, like that of Coucy, so 
finely that it becomes an imposing cairn. He drills holes 
through tl^ walls of a church with such nicety of relationship 
that he might be arranging new light effects. He even corrects 
a landscape by hewing down its trees and unloosing its 
waters as if the ancient plans of Nature needed his better- 
ment. He does all those things .so well that they carry an air 
of permanence, as if red ruin and Ihe breaking up of anhistoric 
land were a bequest to the ages, an heirloom which those ages 
ought to treasure and preserve in inviolate desolation. 
This is the devil's pageant, which my mind and heart, for 
it bites into both, have . .. , , » — 
brought back from a 
strip of France which 
the German Micliael 
lield for more than two 
years. You may. with 
authority, reach it as I 
did, in an hour's motor- 
ride northward from the 
beautiful and happily 
unhurt town of Com- 
piegne, which, itself, 
is a bouquet of France's 
history and romance. 
The perfume of that 
bouquet is still about 
you as you come to the 
region which the Ger- 
mans laid waste when 
they were driven out 
of it in the *pring. 
Consequently, the 
shock is sharp, even 
painful to a degree 
which blunts your 
natural attitude to- 
wards men and affairs, 
as if they were a new 
emanation from the lair 
of,'an unknown animal. It outrages the spiritual being in 
vou, this brutal wastage of the useful and the beauti- 
ful, this dance of ruination, in mockery of the good the 
world has known. If you listen you can almost hear the 
ironic laughter of the old gods of force and spoilage who 
ruled in these northern frontiers of France before Christ 
qave out his message of Christianity. 
" Don't be angry ; only be surprised ! " So read a notice 
which the Germans scrawled upon the best public building 
in Pcronne when they left it a skeleton. One loves to think 
tiiat the man who scrawled these words had a sense of tilings 
hidden to the crowd f>f his fellows, who, probably, stood by 
applauding his sign. Was he a soul trying to strike a glow 
among them, a glow which should illumine, by irony, the 
present and the future to them ? Perhaps his v\Titing was 
just a chance, something done on the surface, into which there 
Kultur 
crawled a meaning unknown to the author. 'Anyhow, he 
wrote better than he knew, and the French have taken him 
at his word by leaving his message standing. They are not 
angry, they have long been beyond anger with the Boche, 
which is always their proud term of contempt for him. They 
are not now surprised at anything he does, for his long spoon 
of the nether regions has supped at their table these three 
years. They are just silent about him, and that is an awful 
judgment to fall upon one nation from another, and that 
other, France, the spiritual mother of all nations. 
If you will spend ten minutes with me in one village we 
visited, you will understand the full eloquence of the French 
silence about the Boche. It was a smiling httle place before 
the war., sheltered from the winds of the north and the cast, 
prosperous in its field? and gardens, self-governed in its 
~ ., -'^ ^ ^:'^.';r> vl ;«.r;7-t -V -- ■ v domestic affairs, in fine, 
homes linked into a 
community. Now its 
Gothic church, built on 
those lines found by the 
medijeval French archi- 
tects as having a lift 
of the soul towards 
heaven, is no more than 
a quarry of stones. 
These he upon each 
other with the precision 
beloved by the Ger- 
mans when they set a 
charge to blow up a 
building. But the man 
they left to fire the 
charge was not, in the 
interest of his own 
skin, the perrect artist, 
for its roar caught him, 
broke half his bones 
against a grave-stone, 
and left him to be 
buried by the on-com- 
ing French soldiers. 
If our poet Gray were 
alive he could write a 
new Elegy in a Church- 
yard, and some day, who knows, a French Gray may 
do it, though it is hardly necessary. You gain the im- 
pression under all his war doings, of a strange abEence 
of what George Meredith would have called the comic 
spirit. By that, one does not mean a mere sense of 
humour, nor a sensitiveness to the ludicrous and a corres- 
ponding desire to avoid it. One means the grave quality 
of comedy which is the companion of tragedy, the some- 
thing ■ elemental but soulful which lies betw een tears and 
laughter and keeps both in their just places. The war has 
given lis many queer lights on German psychology and this 
is one which should be counted in, because it accounts for 
much. If the Germans had the comic spirit in the high sense 
of life and deatli, they would never have done the weird 
things they have done in the valleys of Shadowed I'rnnce, 
because those things will mock them to all eternity. You 
