The dwellings of the eastern suburbs lie in ruined heaps of brick; there may be the ground-plan indicated by the low, rugged remnant of wall. A jagged house-end may still lean there forlornly, with the branches of the springing trees thrusting through its cracks and the spring vines trailing through its shell-rents. With the spring upon it, the whole landscape is more pathetic than in the bareness of winter. This ruination sorted better with leafless boughs and frozen ground. The sweet lush grass smiling in the interstices of ruin is hard to look on. The slender poplar aspiring with tapering grace above the red and grey wreckage is the more beautiful thereby, but the wreckage is more hideously pathetic. It would break your heart to see the pear-tree blossoming blithely in the rubble-strewn area that was once its orchard. The refugee who returns will know (or perhaps he will not) that in place of this _débris_ of crunched brick, splintered beam, twisted iron, convulsed barbed wire, strewn about the trenches and shell-holes of his property, was once the ordered quietness of orchard and garden--his ranks of pear and apple, trim paths, shrubberies, the gay splashes of flower-colour and carpeted softness of lawn. This will wring his heart more than the loss of furniture. Though much of his furniture was heirloom, this little orchard and garden were the fruit of his own twenty years of loving nurture. This little area he idealised as his farmed estate, his stately _parc_. Here on Sabbath evenings he walked down the shrubbed paths with his wife and children, after returning from the weekly promenade of the streets of Arras. His children romped on the lawn since they could crawl. Now not only is it gone, but its associations too--torn by shell, defiled by trenches, desecrated by the cruel contortions of rusting wire. The zigzagged clay parapet winds about his well-beloved plots; the ruins of a machine-gun emplacement lie about the remnant of his summer-house; beef-tins, jam-tins, and undischarged hand-grenades, are strewn beneath his splintered shade-trees. The old sweet orchard air is defiled by the sickening, indefinable stink of a deserted trench; the broken sandbags lie greening about the turf.