The Ypres Times.
07
MY SHELL-SWEPT GARDEN.
Being Reflections written during a summer sojourn on the old Front
after the Armistice.
By Lt.-Col. BECKLES WILLSON.
In the very early morning (before the trains and chars-a-bancs arrive) and in the evening
(when, thank Heaven they are gone) I love to wander in my garden.
I have walked through many of the famous gardens of the world, but for me this one
is a place of matchless enchantment. Here this summer have been thickets of roses and
honeysuckle, a thousand torn and fretted beds of fuchsias, carnations, nasturtiums and
violas, a thousand little pleasaunces whose former enclosures of brick or stone had been
écrasé by German shells. Pathetic clumps of mignonette and alyssum struggled Upwards
through disordered heaps of rubble ivy, vine and Virginia creeper still cling trustfully
to stone surfaces whose dignity went when they became part of a bomb-proof shelter.
Marble pilaster and pedestal lost their aristocratic character and served with slabs of
concrete in the ranks. The sculptured torso of a faun came in usefully to repair the
ravages of a shell.
Since this last spring of the year of Peace the resurgence of all this vegetation has been
miraculous. Certainly, we never noticed it in war time. Could all these flowers have
been here When the shells rained on the doomed city, or when they only dropped at
intervals, ripping open the soil here, scattering a ton or two of debris there, the whole
aspect of the place seemed to us one of carnage and desolation and barrenness. Save
poppies and cornflowers I cannot remember any flowers here in those terrifying days when,
steel helmet on head, I threaded my way expeditiously along the uneven Tommy tracks
and over heaps of rubble. I have asked some of my old comrades if they remember
what flowers grew in these ruined gardens in war time, and they have invariably laughed
and exclaimed derisively
Flowers Flowers of sulphur 5.9 crocuses and Mills tulips. Nothing else,
believe me
One thing I can surely vouch for. There may have been some valiant green foliage
on a few of the high trees about the Zaelhof or on the road bordering the western moat
here and there in some convent garden an UncOnquered giant, his head bloody, but
unbowed," may have waved aloft in defiance his verdant banner but from those four
upstanding boles yonder, a short bomb's throw from our brigade headquarters, whom
we called the Four Grey Nuns, in the year 1917 not a solitary leaf protruded. I surveyed
them many a time and oft. They were chestnuts, and seemingly dead for ever. Thèy
stood at the southern end of a long narrow garden, 60 ft. high, the naked tops of two er
them just impinging on the ragged outline of the distant belfry.
Yet, behold, a strange thing has happened. Three of those four sad Grey Nuns have
burgeoned into life and leaf, so that even their most maimed branches, which during the
tempest of steel and sirocco of gas were flung upward bare to the bone, as if in a gesture of
appeal to heaven, now disport pendulous clusters of long green leaves. It is the same
elsewhere. I counted to-day more than 50 such trees in the heart of the town, set widely
apart, so that they mark the sites of nearly 50 separate sanctuaries in the great shell-sown
garden I call my own.
I came back from Germany to the old front in February. Now the sceptre of autumn
is already beckoning to nature. Six months ago I watched the first crocuses and primulas
pushing their way up by the brink of shell-pits, against duds sulky, treacherous
looking, 15 centimetre gas shells, or 10 cm. H.E.'sor. even peeping out timorously from
the clumsy feet of elephant iron. How they must have wondered at the silence
Or have they been hidden these four hellish years Then came the tulips, chiefly red
and yellow, and narcissi, nearly choked in the nettle and dandelion before their bloom had
quite gone.
