Peronne looks like a city a long way
off, but when you come near it is only the shells of houses. Pozi?re,
Le Sars, Sapigny, are gone altogether.
And all is Dead Sea fruit in a visible desert. The reports of German
victories there are mirage like all the rest; they too will fade into
weeds and old barbed wire.
And the advances that look like victories, and the ruins that look
like cities, and the shell-beaten broken fields that look like farms,
-- they and the dreams of conquest and all the plots and ambitions,
they are all the mirage of a dying dynasty in a desert it made for its
doom.
Bones lead up to the desert, bones are scattered about it, it is the
most menacing and calamitous waste of all the deadly places that have
been inclement to man. It flatters the Hohenzollerns with visions of
victory now because they are doomed by it and are about to die. When
their race has died the earth shall smile again, for their deadly
mirage shall oppress us no more. The cities shall rise again and the
farms come back; hedgerows and orchards shall be seen again; the woods
shall slowly lift their heads from the dust; and gardens shall come
again where the desert was, to bloom in happier ages that forget the
Hohenzollerns.
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