But better than all this the Germans have found war. The simple content of a people at peace in pleasant countries counted for nothing with them. Their Kaiser prepared for war, made speeches about war, and, when he was ready, made war. And now the hills that should be covered with violets are full of murderous holes, and the holes are half full of empty meat tins, and the garden walls have gone and the gardens with them, and there are no woods left to shelter anemones. Boundless masses of brown barbed wire straggle over the landscape. All the orchards there are cut down out of ruthless spite to hurt France whom they cannot conquer. All the little trees that grow near gardens are gone, aspen, laburnum and lilac. It is like this for hundreds of miles. Hundreds of ruined towns gaze at it with vacant windows and see a land from which even Spring is banished. And not a ruined house in all the hundred towns but mourns for some one, man, woman or child; for the Germans make war equally on all in the land where Spring comes no more. Some day Spring will come back; some day she will shine all April in Picardy again, for Nature is never driven utterly forth, but comes back with her seasons to cover up even the vilest things. She shall hide the raw earth of the shell holes till the violets come again; she shall bring back even the orchards for Spring to walk in once more; the woods will grow tall again above the southern anemones; and the great abandoned guns of the Germans will rust by the rivers of France. Forgotten like them, the memory of the War Lord will pass with his evil deeds. Two Songs Over slopes of English hills looking south in the time of violets, evening was falling. Shadows at edges of woods moved, and then merged in the gloaming. The bat, like a shadow himself, finding that spring was come, slipped from the dark of the wood as far as a clump of beech trees and fluttered back again on his wonderful quiet wings. Pairing pigeons were home. Very young rabbits stole out to gaze at the calm still world. They came out as the stars come. At one time they were not there, and then you saw them, but you did not see them come. Towering clouds to the west built palaces, cities and mountains; bastions of rose and precipices of gold; giants went home over them draped in mauve by steep rose-pink ravines into emerald-green empires. Turbulences of colour broke out above the departed sun; giants merged into mountains, and cities became seas, and new processions of other fantastic things sailed by. But the chalk slopes facing south smiled on with the same calm light, as though every blade of grass gathered a ray from the gloaming. All the hills faced the evening with that same quiet glow, which faded softly as the air grew colder; and the first star appeared.