Explore "Barlasch of the Guard" by Henry Seton Merriman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
It is our trust / That there is yet another world to mend / All error and mischance.
Louis d'Arragon knew the road well enough from Königsberg to the Niemen. It runs across a plain, flat as a table, through which many small streams seek their rivers in winding beds. This country was not thinly inhabited, though the villages had been stripped, as foliage is stripped by a cloud of locusts. Each cottage had its ring of silver birch-trees to protect it from the winds which sweep from the Baltic and the steppe. These had been torn and broken down by the retreating army, in a vain hope of making fire with green wood.