THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LX, Issue 17077, 3 September 1917, Page 7

THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY.

By LORD DUNSANY,

8 To the world's wanderers the American people, whose incurable habit it is to go everywhere and see all things, there yet remains one country unexplored. It is a country stranger,.than Haramam Meskutine (where you boil eggs in a river), more ruinous than Pompeii or the. Roman city of Tingad, and more sepulchral than the tombs of tho kings at Thebes; It is a few hundred miles long and narrower tha.a Egypt, and holds--more'buried heroes than Westminster Abbey; it is to tli3 casual eye as desolate as the Sahara, yet on closer investigation as populous as Bond-street; it is more beautiful at night than the Aurora Borealis, and yet more ominous than a picture by Sime; it is No Man's Land. And the things that are done there are things that have never been done before, and will not be done again in this generation; it is a thing to see as one would go to sea Niagara if it, was certain to run dry within a year and fall no more in our time; only it is more wonderful than Niagara, noisier, more magnificent, leaving a more abiding sense in the mind of having move.l amongst gigantb' things. Life is more tense there than in equatorial forests whei'e the rhinoceros comes out of the cactus at unexpected moments; the rhinoceros .is\ only a large form1 of pig, yet. lie is morose and vindictive, and has unpleasant ways, and can be, at his worst, as bai as a better class German; Strange vegetation is to be seen there, too; overgrown cabbages nourishing where they willj free at last of their servitude to man; trees that'have met with amazing calamity in storms that had rievar overtaken a wood before; strangest of all, the birds' going home at their wonted hour to roost in their wonted trees, undisturbed by the thunder that is shaking the hills'; and there in No Man's Land, if anywhere in the world, may Liberty be dreamed of walking along the line between the flare of the rockets .and the nearest edge of the night, walking and blessing the ruined hamlets of France; for where else m the world'has' she been invoked before with such great sacrifice'-of heroic lives. The grave, pitiful windows of houses for ever deserted that look at you in the morning out of the mist, all grey and disconsolate and silent, like the reproachful ghosts of happier days; they are but emblems,.of that sacrifice. It is due to those houses and the sorrows which they remember that all the bnv ners of Liberty should float by them on the day, the day to which an Emperor drank his wine, not knowing what destiny would send.

And on one side cf the line where the mournful, houses are and the shattered trees and .the wild cabbages and thi lairs of the hidden guns, dwell a curious people, who with infinite preparation have made an infinite mistake. Their Emperor ,would fain rule the world. Forts stood against aim; he got guns that would smash forts. International law was against him; he broke international law. Armies opposed him; that was where gag came in. Liberty and justice were against him • but they were mere abstractions, mei'e fancies in the minds of dreamy people, not to be reckoned with by a practical materialist. So he did not reckon with them. . That was the infinite mistake.

And now a poor Emperor that would rule the world professes as his war aims a policy that would do credit to the moderation of an elderly lady. Yet the policy of his J-boats is still the policy of a mad dog in hot weather.

And on the other side of the sorrowful, wonderful land smiles France, the principal cause of all that Imperial jealousy (who would not envy Paris?), the land where all the women have kind faces and sad eyes. That much the Kaiser Has achieved. He has brougat sadness on millions.' All who mourn will remember him; nor will lie be forgotten in his own. country. But it' is not'only sadness that you see in the French faces; you see quite noticeably (it is wonderful how .clear it is, again and again one sees it), 'a look'of calm hope that is almost h~e. prophecy; it is as though some woman passing you by in a town cowld already see wliat her son hopes to see, though he may notlive to behold it. It is as though these French women had some of them seen •■iud spoken with those abstract verities that, the Kaiser scorned, and learned from them in a dream that neither France nor Liberty shall die, and that justice shall not disappear from the nations, though a War Lor*!: banish her in the name of his god.