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Unhappy Far-off Things
The Cathedral Of Arras On the great steps of Arras Cathedral I saw a procession, in silence, standing still. They were in orderly and perfect lines, stirring or swaying sometimes they bent their heads, sometimes two leaned together, but for the most part they were motionless. It was the time when the fashion is just changing and some were newly all in shining yellow, while others still wore green. I went up the steps amongst them, the only human thing, for men and women worship no more in Arras Cathedral, and the trees have come instead; little humble things, all less than four years old, in great numbers thronging the steps processionally, and growing in perfect rows just where step meets step. They have come to Arras with the wind and the rain; which enter the aisles together whenever they will, and go wherever man went; they have such a reverent air, the young limes on the three flights of steps, that you would say they did not know that Arras Cathedral was fallen on evil days, that they did not know they looked on ruin and vast disaster, but thought that these great walls open to stars and sun were the natural and fitting place for the worship of little weeds.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1919
About the author
Lord Dunsany
720 books890 followersEdward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth baron of Dunsany, was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist, notable for his work in fantasy published under the name Lord Dunsany. More than eighty books of his work were published, and his oeuvre includes hundreds of short stories, as well as successful plays, novels and essays. Born to one of the oldest titles in the Irish peerage, he lived much of his life at perhaps Ireland's longest-inhabited home, Dunsany Castle near Tara, received an honourary doctorate from Trinity College, and died in Dublin.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
September 5, 2012
Lord Dunsany is best known for his fantasy, which was an inspiration to many authors such as H.P. Lovecraft. In this slim volume, however, Dunsany dwells on the horror of the First World War. Unlike most war memoirs he speaks very little of himself or even of the fighting. Instead we are treated to the grim spectacle of the wreckage behind the lines.
Dunsany is known for a poetic style that has sadly gone out of fashion, and in this book he is at his most poetic. He ponders the destroyed French villages and the few surviving remnants of happier times the way a Georgian or Victorian traveller would have described the ruins of Greece. You get the sense that Dunsany was very much aware that an age had passed and was looking back with longing at a simpler time.
The original edition runs only 84 pages and includes a sonnet and twelve vignettes. I could have read it in a single sitting but instead savored it over two weeks. The writing is so concise yet so eloquant that it's worth taking some time over. Dunsany proved that he should be counted along with Wilfred Owen and Ernst Junger as one of the Great War's greatest writers.
Dunsany is known for a poetic style that has sadly gone out of fashion, and in this book he is at his most poetic. He ponders the destroyed French villages and the few surviving remnants of happier times the way a Georgian or Victorian traveller would have described the ruins of Greece. You get the sense that Dunsany was very much aware that an age had passed and was looking back with longing at a simpler time.
The original edition runs only 84 pages and includes a sonnet and twelve vignettes. I could have read it in a single sitting but instead savored it over two weeks. The writing is so concise yet so eloquant that it's worth taking some time over. Dunsany proved that he should be counted along with Wilfred Owen and Ernst Junger as one of the Great War's greatest writers.
April 20, 2018
I remember my younger days when, as good Christians, we were taught to pray for the end of the Soviet Union and all its evil doings. Then one day the leaders did just that. They decided to dissolve the union and everyone rejoiced. For maybe five minutes. Until the wars broke out. It turned out all these neighboring factions hated each other and it was actually the Soviet military that maintained the peace. That was something nobody bothered to tell us. Without the army, the freed nations and ethnic groups immediately fell to fighting among themselves over religious differences, much like the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland only on a much larger and intense scale.
What does that have to do with UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS? Just this: I remember an ABC Evening News broadcast with Peter Jennings where he reported the last surviving animal in the Sarajevo Zoo had died. All had died because the caretakers could not reach them. If they stuck their heads into the open, the warring parties would fire on them. And so the animals suffered cruel and horrible deaths, locked in cages with no food or water. I don't know what the last animal was. It was hard to recognize it being skin and bones; a jackal, hyena, or dingo perhaps. It laid its poor body down and perished while stupid religious zealots fired bullets and shells in defense of their loving and merciful god. The image of that poor creature never left me and to this day I say prayers for its poor soul hoping in another world it can sit in judgement over the bastards who condemned it to die a horrible death over some petty squabble it had no involvement with.
UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS is about France after World War 1. Dunsany paints a poignant picture of desolation and ruin come to towns, houses, roads, and gardens after shelling attacks by big guns. It is about people too, but not primarily. It focuses on a downfall of civilization and places haunted "not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions, under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering for dominion of the world."
Two emperors and a sultan whimpering for dominion of the world. And not caring who or what suffers in the process. No different then than today. Only now we get to see it up close and hear political and religious leaders tell us it's a just and noble undertaking.
This is a short book, 12,000 words at most. Many might not even consider it a book. But books should not be judged by their 1000 page word counts. They should be judged for what they tell. Dunsany tells a frightful and tearful tale of man's stupidity and the innocent things that fall victim in its wake. All the while I read it I remembered that poor animal in the Sarajevo Zoo and poured out my hatred on those heartless bastards who claim to fight for religion, but in reality are fueled by nothing but hatred for anyone outside their group.
What does that have to do with UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS? Just this: I remember an ABC Evening News broadcast with Peter Jennings where he reported the last surviving animal in the Sarajevo Zoo had died. All had died because the caretakers could not reach them. If they stuck their heads into the open, the warring parties would fire on them. And so the animals suffered cruel and horrible deaths, locked in cages with no food or water. I don't know what the last animal was. It was hard to recognize it being skin and bones; a jackal, hyena, or dingo perhaps. It laid its poor body down and perished while stupid religious zealots fired bullets and shells in defense of their loving and merciful god. The image of that poor creature never left me and to this day I say prayers for its poor soul hoping in another world it can sit in judgement over the bastards who condemned it to die a horrible death over some petty squabble it had no involvement with.
UNHAPPY FAR-OFF THINGS is about France after World War 1. Dunsany paints a poignant picture of desolation and ruin come to towns, houses, roads, and gardens after shelling attacks by big guns. It is about people too, but not primarily. It focuses on a downfall of civilization and places haunted "not by mere ghosts from all those thousands of graves and half-buried bodies and sepulchral shell-holes; haunted by things huger and more disastrous than that; haunted by wailing ambitions, under the stars or moon, drifting across the rubbish that once was villages, which strews the lonely plain; the lost ambitions of two Emperors and a Sultan wailing from wind to wind and whimpering for dominion of the world."
Two emperors and a sultan whimpering for dominion of the world. And not caring who or what suffers in the process. No different then than today. Only now we get to see it up close and hear political and religious leaders tell us it's a just and noble undertaking.
This is a short book, 12,000 words at most. Many might not even consider it a book. But books should not be judged by their 1000 page word counts. They should be judged for what they tell. Dunsany tells a frightful and tearful tale of man's stupidity and the innocent things that fall victim in its wake. All the while I read it I remembered that poor animal in the Sarajevo Zoo and poured out my hatred on those heartless bastards who claim to fight for religion, but in reality are fueled by nothing but hatred for anyone outside their group.
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June 10, 2012The great fantasist's second book of short pieces on that most drearily Earthbound of conflicts, the Great War. The first, Tales of War, reads like it comes from that brief moment when the war was welcomed as a generation's grand opportunity for adventure; these are the later pieces, once the horror and the waste have set in. Obviously Dunsany is not enough of a dolt ever to sink to moral equivalence (and I have never before been quite so angry that the Kaiser was allowed to live out his days as I was while reading this), but the shine is very much gone. Images recur - the staircase that no longer needs anywhere, the ruin no longer a consoling glimpse of antiquity, the sheer *suddenness* of modern destruction - but that only serves to strengthen the sense of a melancholy picking-over of an age ended before its time.
August 19, 2023
This is a powerful book of Lord Dunsany's reflections as he traveled through France on the way back to the front during WWI. Most of the novel is his observations of the bombed French town of Arras, the sorrow of the loss of the town, the intensity and swiftness of the bombing, and the natural world overwhelming the ruins. The sad truth is that swapping out the names and dates, this book is accurate for any village destroyed by any war.
The most powerful anecdote to me is his conversation with an old man who had returned to the home of his birth. His son killed in the war and his home in ruins, he only had one hope left, that the Kaiser would be destroyed.
"...the traveller heard the mournful sound of iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound that would haunt the waste forever." (A Good War)
"Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap knife sticking up from a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is long out of fashion." (Bermondsey Versus Wurtemburg)
"of all the hopes men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway's posture that ever a family would come home there or tread those steps once more." (Bermondsey Versus Wurtemburg)
"whatever others may write, the twentieth century will not be the age of strategy, but will only seem to have been those fourteen lost quiet summers whose fruits lie under the plaster. (In Bethune)
"Ruin to-day is destruction and sorry and debt and loss, come down untidely upon modern homes and cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the guardian and chronicle of the ages that we should otherwise forget: ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has ceased to be still green in our memory" (The Homes of Arras).
The most powerful anecdote to me is his conversation with an old man who had returned to the home of his birth. His son killed in the war and his home in ruins, he only had one hope left, that the Kaiser would be destroyed.
"...the traveller heard the mournful sound of iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was the sound that would haunt the waste forever." (A Good War)
"Cleaned up and polished, and priced at half a crown apiece, these fragments may look romantic some day in a London shop, but to-day in Albert they look unclean and untidy, like a cheap knife sticking up from a murdered woman's ribs, whose dress is long out of fashion." (Bermondsey Versus Wurtemburg)
"of all the hopes men hope that can never be fulfilled, of all desires that ever come too late, most futile was the hope expressed by that stairway's posture that ever a family would come home there or tread those steps once more." (Bermondsey Versus Wurtemburg)
"whatever others may write, the twentieth century will not be the age of strategy, but will only seem to have been those fourteen lost quiet summers whose fruits lie under the plaster. (In Bethune)
"Ruin to-day is destruction and sorry and debt and loss, come down untidely upon modern homes and cutting off ordinary generations, smashing the implements of familiar trades and making common avocations obsolete. It is no longer the guardian and chronicle of the ages that we should otherwise forget: ruin to-day is an age heaped up in rubble around us before it has ceased to be still green in our memory" (The Homes of Arras).
June 28, 2020
I'm relatively new to the work of Lord Dunsany, and have not much loved his tales of fantasy so far. But Unhappy Far-Off Things is something altogether different, a quiet meditation on the physical ruin of the region of France around the city of Arras in the immediate aftermath of World War I.
It's a short read, very poetic in execution, and really quite moving as Dunsany imagines the lives that had been taking place in the pre-war incarnation of the ruins that he encounters. As a work of anti-war literature, it's very powerful, largely because the author avoids anything violent or gruesome, and focuses instead on the "might have beens", the peaceful lives that might have continued in the absence of war.
It's a short read, very poetic in execution, and really quite moving as Dunsany imagines the lives that had been taking place in the pre-war incarnation of the ruins that he encounters. As a work of anti-war literature, it's very powerful, largely because the author avoids anything violent or gruesome, and focuses instead on the "might have beens", the peaceful lives that might have continued in the absence of war.
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September 2, 2025Preface
"A Dirge of Victory": ⭐️: The sentiment may have been profound, but the execution was unsound. Hah!
"A Cathedral of Arras":
"A Good War": ⭐️⭐️: As long as humans breed like rabbits, they'll need to kill each other off. Duh!
"The House with Two Storeys"
"Bermondsey verses Wurtemburg"
"On an Old Battle-Field"
"The Real Thing"
"A Garden of Arras"
"After Hell"
"A Happy Valley"
"In Bethune"
"In an Old Drawing-Room"
"The Homes of Arras"
"A Dirge of Victory": ⭐️: The sentiment may have been profound, but the execution was unsound. Hah!
"A Cathedral of Arras":
"A Good War": ⭐️⭐️: As long as humans breed like rabbits, they'll need to kill each other off. Duh!
"The House with Two Storeys"
"Bermondsey verses Wurtemburg"
"On an Old Battle-Field"
"The Real Thing"
"A Garden of Arras"
"After Hell"
"A Happy Valley"
"In Bethune"
"In an Old Drawing-Room"
"The Homes of Arras"
July 12, 2018
Unhappy Far-Off Things is essentially 'Tales of War: Volume Two' and with the benefit of hindsight it would have made quite a lot of sense to combine them. On balance I'd say it's the weaker of the two, though still a worthwhile read for Dunsany fans or those with an interest in Great War literature.
November 15, 2019
Oh, perhaps I should have tried one with a lighter tone. I liked it, I just didn't get invested in it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 25, 2020
Dunsany moves through the ruins of Europe like a man moving through his own looted house. It's amazingly effective, and touching - in memoriam of a world that's been murdered.
February 3, 2021
An excellent collection of stories about things affected by war. Ruin, desolation and romance in the small parts that once were, but not anymore.
January 22, 2017
This is an audiobook from LibriVox.
https://librivox.org/unhappy-far-off-...
https://librivox.org/unhappy-far-off-...
March 29, 2024
Unhappy Far-off Things, first published in 1919, is Lord Dunsany's second volume of impressions from the First World War. These are not stories as such, but rather prose-poems. The density of poetic description in Unhappy Far-off Things equals the best of Dunsany's early fantasy short stories.
Dunsany writes of the city of Arras and its surroundings in north-east France, around the end of the War, after German troops have retreated, leaving chaos and devastation. He writes,
And then, in a passage that recalls "The Madness of Andelsprutz" from A Dreamer's Tales, he writes,
The personification of inanimate forces, locations, or circumstances is a special skill that Dunsany has used throughout his fantasy short stories. It is present in Unhappy Far-off Things, as also in Tales of War. Here are two further examples:
Dunsany is writing of a very sad time, when he surveys the destruction of Arras and its surroundings. He writes, "These are just reflections such as pass through the mind in the moonlight among vast ruins and are at once forgotten" (p. 73). However, Dunsany has immortalized his reflections of the First World War in this volume as well as in Tales of War and in some of his poetry. Dunsany's art recalls to us the horror of war.
Dunsany writes of the city of Arras and its surroundings in north-east France, around the end of the War, after German troops have retreated, leaving chaos and devastation. He writes,
It is the Abomination of Desolation, not seen by prophecy far off in some fabulous future, nor remembered from terrible ages by the aid of papyrus and stone, but fallen on our own century, on the homes of folk like ourselves: common things that we knew are become the relics of bygone days. It is our own time that has ended in blood and broken bricks. (p. 71)
And then, in a passage that recalls "The Madness of Andelsprutz" from A Dreamer's Tales, he writes,
Arras sleeps profoundly, roofless, windowless, carpetless; Arras sleeps as a skeleton sleeps, with all the dignity of former days about it, but the life that stirs in its streets is not the old city's life, the old city is murdered. (p. 78)
The personification of inanimate forces, locations, or circumstances is a special skill that Dunsany has used throughout his fantasy short stories. It is present in Unhappy Far-off Things, as also in Tales of War. Here are two further examples:
Picture to yourself a fine drawing-room with high ornamental walls and all the air about it of dignity, peace and ease, that were so recently gone; only just, as it might have been, stepped through the double doorway; skirts, as it were, of ladies only just trailed out of sight; and then turn in fancy to that great town streaming with moonlight, full of the mystery that moonlight always brings, but without the light of it; all black, dark as caverns of earth where no light ever came, blacker for the moonlight than if no moon were there; sombre, mourning and accursed, each house in the great streets sheltering darkness amongst its windowless walls; as though it nursed disaster, having no other children left, and would not let the moon peer in on its grief or see the monstrous orphan that it fondled. (pp. 75-76)
As I went from Arras I passed by a grey, gaunt shape, the ghost of a railway station standing in the wilderness haunting a waste of weeds, and mourning, as it seemed, over rusted railway lines lying idle and purposeless as though leading nowhere, as though all roads had ceased, and all lands were deserted, and all travellers dead: sorrowful and lonely that ghostly shape stood dumb in the desolation among houses whose doors were shut and their windows broken. And in all that stricken assembly no voice spoke but the sound of iron tapping on broken things, which was dumb awhile when the wind dropped. The wind rose and it tapped again. (pp. 83-84)
Dunsany is writing of a very sad time, when he surveys the destruction of Arras and its surroundings. He writes, "These are just reflections such as pass through the mind in the moonlight among vast ruins and are at once forgotten" (p. 73). However, Dunsany has immortalized his reflections of the First World War in this volume as well as in Tales of War and in some of his poetry. Dunsany's art recalls to us the horror of war.
February 13, 2013
Published just after the Great War, this collection of first-hand observations and musings wanders but doesn't fail to satisfy thanks to the author's charming, poetic style.
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