orously, among the willows in the plains
below is a poor exchange for the chant of the _cigale_. But these mills
look out over a landscape that is now dearer to me than Abana and
Pharpar, for many a gallant friend of mine lies beneath its sod.

Cassel is approached by a winding road that turns and returns upon
itself like a corkscrew, and is bordered by an avenue of trees. It has a
bandstand--what town in Flanders and Artois has not?--and a church.
Cheek by jowl with the church is a place of convenience, which seems to
me profane in more senses than one. I have never been able to make up my
mind whether such secularisation of a church wall is the expression of
anti-clerical antipathies, or of a clerical common-sense peculiarly
French in its practical and unblushing acceptance of the elementary
facts of life. But about Cassel I am not so sure. The sight of that
shameless annexe is too familiar in France to please our fastidious
English tastes--it seems to express a truculent nonconformity, it is too
like a dissenting chapel-of-ease.

Wherever God erects a house of prayer
The devil always builds a chapel there.

I have never had the courage to solve my uncertainties by buttonholing a
Frenchman and asking him what is the truth of the matter. I am sure
Anatole France could supply me with any number of whimsical
explanations, all of them suggestive, and not one of them true.

But, except for this sauciness, Cassel is a demure and pleasant place.

Bailleul is mean in comparison, though it has a notable church tower in
which there are traces of some Byzantine imagination brought hither,
perhaps, by a Spanish Army of occupation. Also it has a tea-room which
is the trysting-place of all the officers in billets, and the
_chatelaine_ of which answers your lame and halting French in nimble
English. On the road to Locre it has those Baths and Wash-houses which
have become so justly famous, and whence hosts of British soldiers come
forth like Naaman white as snow, but infinitely more companionable.
Almost any day you may see a bathing-towel unit marching thither or
thence in column of route, their towels held at the slope or the trail
as it pleases their fancy. And in a field outside Bailleul I have seen
open-air smithies and the glow of hot coals, the air resounding with the
clink of hammers upon the anvil--a cheering spectacle on a wet and
inclement winter's day. But Bailleul has few amenities and no charms. It
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