The Project Gutenberg eBook of The End: How the Great War Was Stopped, by L. P. Gratacap
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Title: The End: How the Great War Was Stopped A Novelistic Vagary
Release Date: May 28, 2021 [eBook #65463]
Produced by: Tim Lindell, Graeme Mackreth and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the Hathi Trust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE END: HOW THE GREAT WAR WAS STOPPED
***How the Great War was Stopped A Novelistic Vagary
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It is a pretty village, Saint Choiseul, perched on a hillside whose slopes, undeviatingly smooth and moderate, subside into a flowing land of streams and fields and white roadways. Its narrow streets are decorous with straight lines of prim poplars that have a military stiffness, and while the wind stirs their hedged leaves into audible protest--the flutter of a restrained salutation or a salute simply--it seems hardly able to extort from their braced branches the tribute of an obeisance.
The houses are generally simple things of two and sometimes only one story, built of limestone blocks that have weathered into an undecipherable composition of brown blotches, staring white strips, mossy crevices, little pits of black, and crannies of nutritious decomposition, where tiny grass blades have sprouted. Under favorable skies--and they are almost always favorable at St. Choiseul--their uneven walls become fascinating studies of minor-color harmonies, and rising as they do amid beds of flowers, or just grazed grass, from which they seemed in the broad sunshine to gather subtle tints of gayety, by some evanescent reflexion, they become fascinatingly pretty, and commodious, so to say, to an artist's fancy.