nd 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 t