s
that brought the badly wounded down from the front past the rich market
gardens that sent their produce in other boats to market. Under bridges
its current was divided and subdivided until no one could tell which was
Somme and which canal, busy itself as the peasants and the shopkeepers
doing a good turn to humankind, grinding wheat in one place and in
another farther on turning a loom to weave the rich velvets for which
Amiens is famous, and between its stages of usefulness supplying a
Venetian effect where balconies leaned across one of its subdivisions,
an area of old houses on crooked, short streets at their back huddled
with a kind of ancient reverence near the great cathedral.

At first you might be discriminative about the exterior of Amiens
cathedral, having in mind only the interior as being worth while. I went
inside frequently and the call to go was strongest after seeing an
action. Standing on that stone floor where princes and warriors had
stood through eight hundred years of the history of France, I have seen
looking up at the incomparable nave with its majestic symmetry, French
_poilus_ in their faded blue, helmets in hand and perhaps the white of
a bandage showing, spruce generals who had a few hours away from their
commands, dust-laden dispatch riders, boyish officers with the bit of
blue ribbon that they had won for bravery on their breasts and knots of
privates in worn khaki. The man who had been a laborer before he put on
uniform was possessed by the same awe as the one who had been favored by
birth and education. A black-robed priest passing with his soft tread
could not have differed much to the eye from one who was there when the
Black Prince was fighting in France or the soldiers of Joan or of Conde
came to look at the nave.

The cathedral and the Somme helped to make you whole with the world and
with time. After weeks you ceased to be discriminative about the
exterior. The cathedral was simply the cathedral. Returning from the
field, I knew where on every road I should have the first glimpse of its
serene, assertive mass above the sea of roofs--always there, always the
same, immortal; while the Ridge rocked with the Allied gun-blasts that
formed the police line of fire for its protection.

I liked to walk up the canal tow-path where the townspeople went on
Sunday afternoons for their promenade, the blue of French soldiers on
leave mingling with civilian black--soldiers with wives or mothers