THE OBSERVER, SUNDAY, JULY 22, 1917. 79 [?]

THINGS SEEN: FROM FLANDERS TO ALSACE.

fall. You know this before, but it surprises. It seeths rum. If we are not wise, however, the Boche will see us. So just run up that observation-ladder, take a look over the tip-top of the peaky hill to where the enemy lives over the way, and pop down again. Amidst all these monstrous apparitions and easy paradoxes, these ordinary conversations about extraordinary things, these tragedies, humours, these veiled supremacies of heroic intellect and enduring will, these mighty forces so dispensed or hidden that nowhere do they suggest their overwhelming aggregate—do not ask us to believe it. We have left reality at home. It is so much easier to realise the war when you are not there

II.

But let us come to our marry of narrative. On the Sussex hills early in June one had heard the guns in Flanders thudding through the whole of a blue still day. About a fortnight later a bosom-friend and I left England in dull weather. It was a historic ship. It happened to carry not only General Allenby going out take the Gaza Command, but General Pershing, whose landing on the other side of the Channel would so soon be a definite pledge of epoch-making events. Erect on deck, looking steadily over towards France, the American Commander-in-Chief, with that clasped mouth and trenchant profile, seemed a man likely to set a hard grip on any task.

As for the French port, imagine Brighton with docks added and turned into a war-base thronged with funnels, railway wagons, marching khaki, and long ranges of motor-cars. We spin away in one of them to the Chateau which is headquarters for most visitors to the British front. From other quiet country houses miles from the battle-fronts the fight is directed.

Next day we went over the battlefields of the Somme. From the red tower of the broken church at Albert, high over the weedy abandonment and uncouth heaps of what was once a town square, the colossal gilded Madonna, now prevented from falling, leans outward and downward, like a figure in flight from from heaven to earth, and seems to hold out the Babe over all humanity. A chance stroke of created of one of the strangest, most moving symbols of the world.

[More to come]