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THE OBSERVER, SUNDAY, JULY 22, 1917. 79
THINGS SEEN: FROM FLANDERS TO ALSACE
IV.
Only as much might be said of the following day and every other. I must not dwell on nine-tenths of the things that tempt the pen. On a bright Sunday morning, when little French girls were all in white and our Catholic soldiers were marching to attend Mass in French churches, we set out for scenes as renowned as any in the war. A valley with grassy downs like Box Hill, only barer. The lofty blanched ruin of a great church with tall stiff fragments of wall perilously balanced like crude and aimless pinnacles. Around the dumps of rubbish and lowly shells of brick that were houses. This was Ablain St. Nazaire. The height above is no less a place than Notre Dame de Lorette. We breezy top is seamed with trenches amongst the overgrowth. Mouldering equipment lies all about and here and there the bones of men. Below, the industrial plain spreads away beyond the horizon. We see Lens, only four miles off. Near by we feel rather than see Loos of desperate memory. A hundred colliery villages with their tail pitgear and slag pyramids dot these faint green levels stretching like a still sea into the distant mist and smoke which hold Lille. For we are on the very rim of Flanders, looking over now into what our foreheads called simply the Low Countries. No wonder that when army more than two years ago stormed this crest and saw the view they shouted with exultation and thought that they would end the war in their next stride.
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