He pushed them forward with his hands, and back down the road they had come. He ran and they ran till they reached their dwelling, and entered, and stood at the north window, looking over toward the dim house from which they had escaped. Out from the still night of darkness, came a low thunder from beyond the Yser. In the tick of a pulse-beat, the moaning of a shell throbbed on the air and, with instant vibrancy, the singing string of the piano at their back [112]answered the flight of the shell. And in the same breath, they heard a roar at the railroad, and the crash of timbers. Soft licking flames broke out in the house of the Belgian watchers. Slowly but powerfully, the flames gathered volume, and swept up their separate tongues into one bright blaze, till the house was a bonfire against the heavy sky.

[112]

 LOST

There were cities in Belgium of medieval loveliness, where the evening light lay in deep purple on canals seeping at foundations of castle and church, with the sacred towers tall in the sky, and a moon just over them, and a star or two beside.

That beauty has been torn out of a man's consciousness and spoiled to his love for ever, by moving up a howitzer and priming it with destruction. First, the rumble of the gun from far away, then the whistle of flying metal, sharpening its anger as it nears, then the thud and roar of explosion as it clutches and dissolves its mark. Now its seven-mile journey is ended. It has found its home and its home is a ruin. Over the peaceful earth and under a silent sky, bits of destruction are travelling, projections of the human will. Where lately there was a soft outline, rising from the [114]soil as if the stones of the field had been called together by the same breath that spread the forest, now there is a heap of rock-dust. Man, infinite in faculty, has narrowed his devising to the uses of havoc. He has lifted his hand against the immortal part of himself. He has said—"The works I have wrought I will turn back to the dust out of which they came."

[114]

All the good labor of minds and hands which we cannot bring back is undone in an instant of time by a few pounds of chemical. That can be burned and broken in the passage of one cloud over the moon which not all the years of a century will restore. Seasons return, but not to us returns the light in the windows of Rheims.

V WAR

There fell a day when the call came from Ypres to 

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