With what diffidence, as the generations passed, would each first peep over the wall be undertaken. In some years it would be scaled from one side, in some ages from the other. What a barrier that old red wall would have seemed! How new the adventure would have seemed in each age to those that dared it, and how old to the wall! And in all those years the elders never made a door, but kept that huge and haughty separation. And the ivy quietly grew greener. And then one day a shell came from the east, and, in a moment, without plan or diffidence or pretext, tumbled away some yards of the proud old wall, and the two gardens were divided no longer: but there was no one to walk in them any more.
Wistfully round the edge of the huge breach in the wall, a Michaelmas daisy peered into the garden, in whose mined paths I stood.
He heard an English voice shouting, “Paiper! Paiper!” No mere spelling of the word will give the intonation. It was the voice of English towns he heard again. The very voice of London in the morning. It seemed like magic, or like some wonderfully vivid dream.
He was only a hundred miles or so from England; it was not very long since he had been there; yet what he heard seemed like an enchanted dream, because only the day before he had been in the trenches.
They had been twelve days in the trenches and had marched out at evening. They had marched five miles and were among tin huts in quite a different world. Through the doorways of the huts green grass could be seen and the sun was shining on it. It was morning. Everything was strangely different. You saw more faces smiling. Men were not so calm as they had been during the last twelve days, the last six especially: someone was kicking a football at somebody else’s hut and there was excitement about it.