IN THE NORTH
June 19th, 1915.
On the way from Doullens to Montreuil-sur-Mer, on a shining summer
afternoon. A road between dusty hedges, choked, literally strangled,
by a torrent of westward-streaming troops of all arms. Every few
minutes there would come a break in the flow, and our motor would
wriggle through, advance a few yards, and be stopped again by a
widening of the torrent that jammed us into the ditch and splashed a
dazzle of dust into our eyes. The dust was stifling--but through it,
what a sight!
Standing up in the car and looking back, we watched the river of war
wind toward us. Cavalry, artillery, lancers, infantry, sappers and
miners, trench-diggers, road-makers, stretcher-bearers, they swept
on as smoothly as if in holiday order. Through the dust, the sun
picked out the flash of lances and the gloss of chargers' flanks,
flushed rows and rows of determined faces, found the least touch of
gold on faded uniforms, silvered the sad grey of mitrailleuses and
munition waggons. Close as the men were, they seemed allegorically
splendid: as if, under the arch of the sunset, we had been watching
the whole French army ride straight into glory...
Finally we left the last detachment behind, and had the country to
ourselves. The disfigurement of war has not touched the fields of
Artois. The thatched farmhouses dozed in gardens full of roses and
hollyhocks, and the hedges above the duck-ponds were weighed down
with layers of elder-blossom. On all sides wheat-fields skirted with
woodland went billowing away under the breezy light that seemed to
carry a breath of the Atlantic on its beams. The road ran up and
down as if our motor were a ship on a deep-sea swell; and such a
sense of space and light was in the distances, such a veil of beauty
over the whole world, that the vision of that army on the move grew
more and more fabulous and epic.
The sun had set and the sea-twilight was rolling in when we dipped
down from the town of Montreuil to the valley below, where the
towers of an ancient abbey-church rise above terraced orchards. The
gates at the end of the avenue were thrown open, and the motor drove
into a monastery court full of box and roses. Everything was sweet
and secluded in this mediaeval place; and from the shadow of
cloisters and arched passages groups of nuns fluttered out, nuns all
black or all white, gliding, peering and standing at gaze. It was as
if we had plunged back into a century to which motors were unknown
and our car had been some monster cast up from a Barbary shipwreck;
and the startled attitudes of these holy women did credit to their
sense of the picturesque; for the Abbey of Neuville is now a great
Belgian hospital, and such monsters must frequently intrude on its
seclusion...
Sunset, and summer dusk, and the moon. Under the monastery windows a
walled garden with stone pavilions at the angles and the drip of a
fountain. Below it, tiers of orchard-terraces fading into a great
moon-confused plain that might be either fields or sea...
