This is all ruin of a sort more or less inevitable. Follow the road winding down the valley beyond the suburb, and you will see the foul, deliberate ruin of whole avenues of trees that once lined the route. You know how these stately elm and beech met overhead for leagues along the pleasant roads of France; there they lie now naked in the turf by the road-side, untimely cut down by the steam-saw of the Hun. He traversed the whole length of this road with that admirable German thoroughness of his and felled them all across it to bar our progress. The shattering of Arras Cathedral was necessary; this is mere expediency, and near to wantonness. Forty years of stately growth lie there gaunt and sapless. Soon you will see the tender tufts of green spring from the smooth-cut stump. They have been beautifully cut: German machinery is unimpeachably efficient. McAndrew's song of steam is the noble celebration of the triumph of human mechanical genius; these bleeding stumps are the monument that will testify for half a century to the blasphemous misapplication of German mechanical skill. The steam-saw must have worked beautifully. You can conceive the German N.C.O. in charge of it standing by emitting approval as the stately beech crashed across the road from the fine, smooth cut--"_Schön!... Schön!_" ...
This will hurt the French more than other peoples think; they are so proud of their forestry; they plant with such considerate foresight into the pleasure that posterity will have in their trees--with such prevision as to the arrangement of plantations and as to the _tout ensemble_ of the avenue and the _forêt_ when the trees shall be mature. A tree is nothing until you have personified it: the French personify the trees of their private plantations; they are like members of the _famille_. And such is the State care of forestry that you almost believe it has personified the State plantations in a collective sort of way, regarding them almost as a branch of society or of the nation. The national care of trees is with them a thing analogous to the administration of orphanages. The German will have reckonings to make after the War for maimed and murdered trees and for annihilated orchards, as well as for fallen and deformed Frenchmen....