Bird and Car
I saw last Bank Holiday an odd illustration of a charming verse of one of E. V. Lucas's most charming poems, written, so far as I remember, in answer to an ecstatic poem on " Speed " by Henley.
I grant the glory, the romance; But look behind the veil.
Suppose that while the motor pants
You miss the nightingale.
A motor-car had made its way over heather and between gorse bushes into a clump of thorn, cherry, raspberry and gorse that was the most sacrosanct spot on the common. It finally drew up within ten or twelve yards of a nightingale's nest, a grim intruder into a sanctum peculiarly favoured year after year by the nightingales. The passage of the car reminded me of a sad sight in the War. A tank rolling along a narrow lane in France crushed out of recognition a blackcap's nest
that I had been watching. The little disaster has ever since
stayed in my mind as the symbol of a juggernaut world : that ugly, blind, clumsy, dead thing mercilessly crushing what was fair and delicate and living. Would it be fair to infer that the driver of the car over the common was as blind as the driver of the tank to the neighbourhood of the nest and the birds ? It was a miracle how some of the larks and one yellow-hammer avoided the cars and their occupants, but the close neighbourhood of the nests was probably not so much as suspected.
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