The man that I met in Croisilles had none of these things at all. He had that one hope only. Do not, I pray you, by your voice or vote, or by any power or influence that you have, do anything to take away from this poor old Frenchman the only little hope he has left. The more trivial his odd hope appears to you compared with your own high hopes that come so easily to you amongst all your fields and houses, the more cruel a thing must it be to take it from him. I learned many things in Croisilles, and the last of them is this strange one the old man taught me. I turned and shook hands with him and said good-bye, for I wished to see again our old front line that we used to hold over the hill, now empty, silent at last. “The Boche is defeated,” I said. “Vaincu, vaincu,” he repeated. And I left him with something almost like happiness looking out of his tearful eyes. Bermondsey _versus_ Wurtemburg The trees grew thinner and thinner along the road, then ceased altogether, and suddenly we saw Albert in the wood of the ghosts of murdered trees, all grey and deserted. Descending into Albert past trees in their agony we came all at once on the houses. You did not see them far off as in other cities; we came on them all at once as you come on a corpse in the grass. We stopped and stood by a house that was covered with plaster marked off to look like great stones, its pitiful pretence laid bare, the slates gone and the rooms gone, the plaster all pitted with shrapnel. Near it lay an iron railing, a hand-rail blown there from the railway bridge; a shrapnel bullet had passed through its twisted stem as though it had gone through butter. And beside the hand-rail lay one of the great steel supports of the bridge that had floated there upon some flaming draught; the end of it bent and splayed as though it had been a slender cane that someone had shoved too hard into the earth. There had been a force abroad in Albert that could do these things, an iron force that had no mercy for iron, a mighty mechanical contrivance that could take machinery and pull it all to pieces in a moment as a child takes a flower to pieces petal by petal. When such a force was abroad what chance had man? It had come down upon Albert suddenly, and railway lines and bridges had drooped and withered and the houses had stooped down in the blasting heat, and in that attitude I found them still, worn-out, melancholy heaps overcome by disaster. Pieces of paper rustled about like footsteps, dirt covered the ruins, fragments of rusty shells lay as unsightly and dirty as that which they had destroyed. Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap knife sticking up from a murdered woman’s ribs, whose dress is long out of fashion. The stale smell of war arose from the desolation.