June 20th.
Today our way ran northeast, through a landscape so English that
there was no incongruity in the sprinkling of khaki along the road.
Even the villages look English: the same plum-red brick of tidy
self-respecting houses, neat, demure and freshly painted, the
gardens all bursting with flowers, the landscape hedgerowed and
willowed and fed with water-courses, the people's faces square and
pink and honest, and the signs over the shops in a language half way
between English and German. Only the architecture of the towns is
French, of a reserved and robust northern type, but unmistakably in
the same great tradition.
War still seemed so far off that one had time for these digressions
as the motor flew on over the undulating miles. But presently we
came on an aviation camp spreading its sheds over a wide plateau.
Here the khaki throng was thicker and the familiar military stir
enlivened the landscape. A few miles farther, and we found ourselves
in what was seemingly a big English town oddly grouped about a
nucleus of French churches. This was St. Omer, grey, spacious,
coldly clean in its Sunday emptiness. At the street crossings
English sentries stood mechanically directing the absent traffic
with gestures familiar to Piccadilly; and the signs of the British
Red Cross and St. John's Ambulance hung on club-like facades that
might almost have claimed a home in Pall Mall.
The Englishness of things was emphasized, as we passed out through
the suburbs, by the look of the crowd on the canal bridges and along
the roads. Every nation has its own way of loitering, and there is
nothing so unlike the French way as the English. Even if all these
tall youths had not been in khaki, and the girls with them so pink
and countrified, one would instantly have recognized the passive
northern way of letting a holiday soak in instead of squeezing out
its juices with feverish fingers.
When we turned westward from St. Omer, across the same pastures and
watercourses, we were faced by two hills standing up abruptly out of
the plain; and on the top of one rose the walls and towers of a
compact little mediaeval town. As we took the windings that led up
to it a sense of Italy began to penetrate the persistent impression
of being somewhere near the English Channel. The town we were
approaching might have been a queer dream-blend of Winchelsea and
San Gimignano; but when we entered the gates of Cassel we were in a
place so intensely itself that all analogies dropped out of mind.
It was not surprising to learn from the guide-book that Cassel has
the most extensive view of any town in Europe: one felt at once that
it differed in all sorts of marked and self-assertive ways from
every other town, and would be almost sure to have the best things
going in every line. And the line of an illimitable horizon is
exactly the best to set off its own quaint compactness.
We found our hotel in the most perfect of little market squares,
with a Renaissance town-hall on one side, and on the other a
miniature Spanish palace with a front of rosy brick adorned by grey
carvings. The square was crowded with English army motors and
beautiful prancing chargers; and the restaurant of the inn (which
has the luck to face the pink and grey palace) swarmed with khaki
tea-drinkers turning indifferent shoulders to the widest view in
Europe. It is one of the most detestable things about war that
everything connected with it, except the death and ruin that result,
is such a heightening of life, so visually stimulating and
absorbing. "It was gay and terrible," is the phrase forever
recurring in "War and Peace"; and the gaiety of war was everywhere
in Cassel, transforming the lifeless little town into a romantic
stage-setting full of the flash of arms and the virile animation of
young faces.
From the park on top of the hill we looked down on another picture.
All about us was the plain, its distant rim merged in northern
sea-mist; and through the mist, in the glitter of the afternoon sun,
far-off towns and shadowy towers lay steeped, as it seemed, in
summer quiet. For a moment, while we looked, the vision of war
shrivelled up like a painted veil; then we caught the names
pronounced by a group of English soldiers leaning over the parapet
at our side. "That's Dunkerque"--one of them pointed it out with his
pipe--"and there's Poperinghe, just under us; that's Furnes beyond,
and Ypres and Dixmude, and Nieuport... "And at the mention of
those names the scene grew dark again, and we felt the passing of
the Angel to whom was given the Key of the Bottomless Pit.
That night we went up once more to the rock of Cassel. The moon was
full, and as civilians are not allowed out alone after dark a
staff-officer went with us to show us the view from the roof of the
disused Casino on top of the rock. It was the queerest of sensations
to push open a glazed door and find ourselves in a spectral painted
room with soldiers dozing in the moonlight on polished floors, their
kits stacked on the gaming tables. We passed through a big vestibule
among more soldiers lounging in the half-light, and up a long
staircase to the roof where a watcher challenged us and then let us
go to the edge of the parapet. Directly below lay the unlit mass of
the town. To the northwest a single sharp hill, the "Mont des Cats,"
stood out against the sky; the rest of the horizon was unbroken, and
floating in misty moonlight. The outline of the ruined towns had
vanished and peace seemed to have won back the world. But as we
stood there a red flash started out of the mist far off to the
northwest; then another and another flickered up at different points
of the long curve. "Luminous bombs thrown up along the lines," our
guide explained; and just then, at still another point a white light
opened like a tropical flower, spread to full bloom and drew itself
back into the night. "A flare," we were told; and another white
flower bloomed out farther down. Below us, the roofs of Cassel slept
their provincial sleep, the moonlight picking out every leaf in the
gardens; while beyond, those infernal flowers continued to open and
shut along the curve of death.
