They wished to show their power
by ruining the future of the town, which lived on its _monument
historique_: but (as often happens with their "frightfulness") that
object was just the one they failed in. I can't believe that the castle
of Ham was as striking in its untouched magnificence as now in the
rose-red splendour of its ruin!
To be sure, the guardians can never again show precisely where Joan of
Arc was imprisoned, or the rooms where Louis Napoleon lived through his
six years of captivity, or the little garden he used to cultivate, or
the way he passed to escape over the drawbridge, dressed as a mason,
with a plank on his shoulder. But the glorious old tower or donjon still
stands, one hundred feet high and one hundred feet wide. German
gunpowder was too weak to bring it down, and so perhaps the prophecy of
the Comte de St. Pol, builder of the fortress, may be fulfilled--that
while France stands, the tower of Ham's citadel will stand. Thousands
more pilgrims will come in a year, after the war, to see what the
Germans did and what they failed to do, than ever came in the mild,
prosperous days before 1914, when Ham's best history was old. They will
come and gaze at the massive bulk--red always as if reflecting sunset
light--looming against the blue; they will peer down into dusky dungeons
underground: and the new guardian (a mutilated soldier he'll be,
perhaps, decorated with the _croix de guerre_) will tell them about the
girl of Ham who lured a German officer to a death-trap in a secret
_oubliette_, "where 'tis said his body lies to-day.
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