The Nightmare Countries
There are certain lands in the darker dreams of poetry that stand out
in the memory of generations. There is for instance Poe's ``Dark tarn
of Auber, the ghoul-haunted region of Weir''; there are some queer
twists in the river Alph as imagined by Coleridge; two lines of
Swinburne:
By the tideless dolorous inland sea
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
are as haunting as any. There are in literature certain regions of
gloom, so splendid that whenever you come on them they leave in the
mind a sort of nightmare country which one's thoughts revisit on
hearing the lines quoted.
It is pleasant to picture such countries sometimes when sitting before
the fire. It is pleasant because you can banish them by the closing of
a book; a puff of smoke from a pipe will hide them altogether, and
back come the pleasant, wholesome, familiar things. But in France they
are there always. In France the nightmare countries stand all night in
the starlight; dawn comes and they still are there. The dead are
buried out of sight and others take their places among men; but the
lost lands lie unburied gazing up at the winds; and the lost woods
stand like skeletons all grotesque in the solitude; the very seasons
have fled from them. The very seasons have fled; so that if you look
up to see whether summer has turned to autumn, or if autumn has turned
to winter yet, nothing remains to show you. It is like the eccentric
dream of some strange man, very arresting and mysterious, but lacking
certain things that should be there before you can recognize it as
earthly. It is a mad, mad landscape. There are miles and miles and
miles of it. It is the biggest thing man has done. It looks as though
man in his pride, with all his clever inventions, had made for himself
a sorry attempt at creation.
Indeed when we trace it all back to its origin we find at the
beginning of this unhappy story a man who was only an emperor and
wished to be something more. He would have ruled the world but has
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 C�sars
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 Pozi�res 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 Pozi�res and in
Ginchy.
A fanciful man once called himself the Emperor of the Sahara: the
German Kaiser has stolen into a fair land and holds with weakening
hands a land of craters and weed, and wire and wild cabbages and old
German bones.
Read next: Tale 16 - Spring and the Kaiser
Read previous: Tale 14 - Spring in England and Flanders
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