20 
LAND & WATER 
August i6, 1917 
A Church in Arras 
mav mock a man and only miike liim angry, but let the 
Domesday Book of history rnock a nation on the irrefutable 
evidence "of its own deeds, gloried in, and that nation has 
come by its Purgatory. " Don't be angry ; only be sur- 
prised ! " It was the best word that German scrawler co';.xd 
write for his people above the gre\ 
ruins of Peronne ; but it is also the 
just word in their condemnation 
and damnation. 
That, and such as that, is the 
elegy which the Boche has written 
of himself across the slopes of 
Northern France. You would think, 
•from the care of his scarming and 
the even roll of his rhythm, that 
he loved his task, was disappointed 
if he let it go imperfect. His gods 
of devastation must have chided 
him for leaving the high-set historic 
town of Noyon without lacerating 
it more deeply. True, he stole its 
metals and its other wares valuable 
to him, and he broke the canals 
and made a sea of waters out of 
which the cathedral Ufted itself like 
a lighthouse. But the cathedral 
itself he spared, being in a hurry 
to escape, and so much the artist in 
destruction that, if he could not do 
it well, he would not do it at all. 
Only one street did he sack, in his 
modern fashion with mine and 
bomb, and that was as he finally 
departed, when his false gods 
were laughing at his irnipotence. 
We think of the wanton desolation 
which the Boche has wrought. 
Possibly he thinks, with regret, how 
much more complete he might 
have made it, which is a thought 
to stagger humanity. 
You get the idea, as you pass through the area which the 
Boche wrecked, because he could no longer hold it, that he 
showed a special fondness for trying to up-root any patch 
of history he might come upon. The Chateau of Ham, 
which fell within his pale of devilment, is an instance. It 
had, that strong bastion set among the watery lands of the 
Somme, known the presence of Joan of Arc. It was the 
prison-house in which Louis Napoleon was confined for 
years, and from which, disguised as a workman, he escaped 
to Belgium, and then to England. Since then time had 
eaten into its vaults, it had become a mere relic of history, 
but the Germans would not let it stand. They must, with 
their queer lack of vision, make it a relic of their own doings 
as super-Huns. So they mined it methodically, and one 
morning it went up in a tumult of stones and earth, Grossc 
Tower and all. Now its ruins lie mute, bare to the heavens, 
and the Germans fancy they have cut a page of history out 
of the Book of France. What they have really done is to 
illumine that page for all time, for they have set free the 
spirit of the keep from the moth and rust of material decay. 
Posterity will say that the Germans would have done 
better for themselves if they had not left any self-made 
memorials «« advertise their spirit as invaders. Often, 
apparently, there would be an artist, a cartoonist, among 
them, and what must he do but paint the Boche on a school 
wall or embellish a dug-out with ribald sketches. These 
leavings should be preserved, and, if it be possible, gathered 
into a gallery where people might study the Boche at war 
-s he sees himself. How he gloats over his supposed streng h 
• s a fighting animal ; how lust and conquest are glonlicd ; 
how brutal it all is ! How coarse is Boc-he humour when 
the soldier-artist lets it loose for the benefit of his comrades 
l,illeted with him ! Examples of it have a miasma like a 
battlefield sown with corpses, with shell-holes lull of stagnant 
water and with poisonous flies. But this reading of his 
pictures done in odd, triumphant hours of the war of occu- 
pation, could never have struck the German master of art, 
otherwise he would have destroyed them with the Chateaux 
of Coucy and Ham. ■ , r~ ^ ■ ^ ^^ r <■ 1 +>, 
It was a principle of war with Frederick the Great, and the 
Prussian spoilers whom he begat, to live upon the enemy 
country, if that was possible. The Prussians of to-day have 
carried the doctrine so much farther that they first live 
upon the enemy country and then seek to destroy it. That 
is why in a pilgrimage by the Aisne ;ind the Somme, across 
"round which was beneath the Prussian war-barrow, you 
have a feeling of human desolation as well as of material 
desolation. Where are the young folk whose laughter filled 
the land ? If they are quite young you may meet them, 
but there is no laughter in their voices. If they are not 
quite- young they are doing the work of France, or, some 
of them anyhow, doing that of Germany, under compulsion, • 
for they have been spirited away. Where are the middle- 
aged people, who were the heads of families, the administrators 
^ ^ of communities ? Fighting for the 
Tricolour, carted off behind the 
German lines, or, a few of them, 
left to emphasise the absence of 
the others. And the old people ? 
They remain, numbed, stricken, 
looking out from herded corners, 
where they have found retreats, 
wondering if they will live long 
enough to have their France her- 
self again. 
The Germans made a desert, 
but the French, with their quick 
brains and their quick hands, are 
sorting it into shape, and soon it 
will take life again. Meanwhile, it 
is the street behind the sound of 
the guns, a street along which the 
man - power of F"rance marshals 
itself, always on the move forward. 
Houses cannot be rebuilt in a day, 
much less towns so thoroughly 
razed as, say, Chauny. Stately 
trees which shaded roads taking 
you over the hills and far away, 
cannot be grown to statelinefes 
again in this generation. But not 
all this defilement by the German 
has quenched the spirit of France 
onp little bit. It has outraged that ' 
spirit, given it new fire, burnt into 
it a heat which has not been since 
the Great Revolution gave the 
world its Cap of Liberty. The 
beautiful body of France has been 
hacked, tortured, but her soul goes 
marching on, untarnished, untarnishable, because it has a 
divinity unknown to the German, undivined by him. For 
those reasons, one returns from the Appian Way of ruins 
sad at heart, but full of faith, nay of pride, in the redeem 
ing pow-er of the French nation, wliich may God bless. 
The Cathedral, Albert 
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A Village in France 
