er, "a small and quiet place on the Yser."

It is one of the noisiest places I have ever been in. There was a day
and a half in May when shells dropped into the streets and houses, every
minute. Every day at least a few screaming three-inch shells fall on the
village. Aeroplanes buzz overhead, shrapnel pings in the sky. Rifle
bullets sing like excited telegraph wires. If Baedeker found Nieuport
a quiet place, he was brought up in a boiler factory.

[Illustration: Baedeker, the distinguished German writer, states that
this Fifteenth Century Gothic church in Nieuport has "a modern timber
roof." We looked for it.]

His very next phrase puzzled me--"with 3500 inhabitants," he says.

And I didn't see one. There were dead people in the ruins of the houses.
The soldiers used to unearth them from time to time. I remember that the
poet speaks of "the poor inhabitant below," when he is writing of a body
in a grave. It must be in that sense that Baedeker specifies those 3500
inhabitants. But he shouldn't do that kind of imaginative touch. It
isn't in his line. And it might mislead people.

Think of a stranger getting into Nieuport after dark on a wet night,
with his mind all set on the three hotels Baedeker gives him a choice
of.

"All unpretending," he says.

Just the wrong word. Why, those hotels are brick dust. They're flat on
the ground. There isn't a room left. He means "demolished." He doesn't
use our language easily. I can see that. It is true they are
unpretending, but that isn't the first word you would use about them,
not if you were fluent.

Then he gives a detail that is unnecessary. He says you can sleep or eat
there for a "franc and a half." That exactitude is out of place. It is
labored. I ask you what a traveler would make of the "11/2 fr. _pour
diner_," when he came on that rubbish heap which is the Hotel of
Hope--"Hotel de l'Esperance." That is like Baedeker, all through his
volume. He will give a detail, like the precise cost of this dinner,
when there isn't any food in the neighborhood. It wouldn't be so bad if
he'd sketch things in general terms. That I could forgive. But it is too
much when he makes a word-picture of a Flemish table d'hote for a franc
and a half in a section of country where even the cats are starving.

His next statement is plain twisted. "Nieuport is noted for its
obstinate resistance to the French."

I saw French soldiers there every day. They were defending the place.
His way