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Dunkirk, and the far end of La Panne. The whole place was in a racket with anti-aircraft guns and the guns of the aeroplanes blazing away overhead. As I stood at my window listening I heard the unmistakable zip-zip-zip of bullets falling into the pond below, and I was puzzled, for they were not falling from a great height. Next day the riddle was solved, for it appeared that one of the airmen had come down to within sixty yards of the ground, and as he passed, on the other side of the house, he blazed away with his machine-gun at the gendarmes on the dunes, and I had heard the bullets flicking along between the villas as he passed, and striking the pond behind. Fortunately nobody was hit, as the gendarmes hid in the dunes till the brute of a Boche had passed. I was in and out of bed about half a dozen times between eleven and one o'clock, as they kept on coming and going, and it was much too exciting to keep away from the window.

The day turned wet and cold again, with rain-clouds, which was horrid after the loveliness of yesterday and the blazing heat of Poperinghe, with its narrow streets placarded everywhere with its gas warning of " WIND DANGEROUS" in big letters.

July 5. A perfectly quiet night, even no shelling, for the first time since we have been here, and it seemed uncanny to have it so still. Unfortunately the weather had become dull and cloudy for King George's visit. He came to lunch at La Panne, which was quite cheery, and after luncheon Princess Aand I went to the hospital again to see the wounded. There were a good few fresh ones brought down last night from a raid.

July 6. Alas, the final day, and I woke feeling very sad, for I loved every hour of my stay. The weather was fine again, with bright sunshine, so we determined, the Princess and I, to coax or bully Lord A into taking us to Mont Kemmel or the Scharpenberg to see the whole of the Ypres country. For a long time it seemed hopeless, but by dint of quiet determination we got there in the end, starting off after lunch and driving through Furnes, as one always does going east and south, but not along the Woesten-Elverdinghe bit of the road, for we turned southwards before that, and then bore east to Poperinghe. After Poperinghe it was new country to me, and very pretty country too-undulating, fertile, and wooded, with stray trees destroyed in patches by gas-shells, so that from the middle of a copse or hedgerow half a dozen completely dead trees would stand up with leafless branches like appealing hands outstretched to heaven. After Poperinghe we got well into the hurly-burly of traffic, which entailed long waits at the roadside to let strings of motor-lorries and guns with their tractors pass us. As we

waited we watched the observation balloons high overhead and the Boche planes circling about to spy out the land and have a shot at the balloons, and the sky was full of the white puffs of shrapnel, while we had to pause at that rather too-well-known spot, "International Corner," for a string of mules to pass us on their way to water. The planes were very busy, and it was glorious weather, a blue, cloudless sky, and the whole scene clearcut against it like a cameo. We couldn't have had a more perfect afternoon to get a view over the great stretch of country we were seeking, as from Poperinghe, Reninghelst, and Heskens to Westoutre we swung sharply east, and after the sharp turn at "Canada Corner" pulled up at the foot of the Scharpenberg. The country had been more mildly undulating, yet it in no way prepared one for the Scharpenberg and Mont Kemmel which, standing one rather behind the other, form a most extraordinary ridge of height, rising out of the flat country without any apparent reason. They give one somehow the idea that the earth has spat them out, as though suffering from indigestion. Kemmel, a long ridge, had many trees and several churches and buildings on it, but on the Scharpenberg there was little beyond a cluster of tumbledown cottages on the eastern spur, and a great windmill working steadily. There was no path on to the top, but we clambered up by rough steps cut in the turf and boarded by the troops. Certainly without the aid of these boards it would be a difficult place to get to on a wet day, with the clinging soil and the steepness of about 200 feet sheer rise.

Just below the hill to the north lay a model to scale of the whole of the Wytschaete-Messines Boche trenches and positions as they existed before the Second Army blew them to glory--a wonderful model, complete with wire entanglements, woods, streams, trenches, etc., beautifully laid out, and before the fight officers and N.C.O.'s came and studied it, so that each should know exactly where he was to go and what his job should be. But interesting though the model was, I ached to get to the top and look down on Ypres-Ypres was my goal, because of all the fighting my husband has had round there. At last we climbed up the hill, and I found myself, under the shadow of the creaking, rattling old windmill, gazing down over-to me--the most wonderful scene in the world; the whole of Belgium where for nearly three years the British have fought and struggled and died in thousands. A little to the north-east, embedded in green trees, stood Ypres, the grey battered towers still standing, and around them came German shells banging down into the debris of what was once a perfect sample of medieval architecture. Now there was nothing. Nothing but the battered grey towers, stripped of their traceries and standing up in rugged desolation from

among the green of the surrounding trees. Nothing ever has or ever will seize my imagination as that scene did. I knew it would clutch at my heart, but standing there on the Scharpenberg in the loveliness of a July evening, looking down on the actual battlefields of Flanders, it was the most stirring thing I have ever felt. Down below one saw it all going on steadily, relentlessly, as it had gone on for three years. The Boche shells raising clouds of pink, grey, or black dust and smoke, while from the sheltering and apparently peaceful woods below us came the flash of the British guns, followed by the long-drawn whine or rumble of shells speeding away to the enemy lines. Overhead hung ungainly observation balloons, and aeroplanes twisting and turning, their guns stuttering angrily, while the "Archies "kept up a perpetual chorus. Beside us the revolving windmill's great sails cast their shadows on the ground, from a canvas shelter came the tapping of a British military telegraphist, and, under the masking of a copse of young chestnut growth, the flapping of a signaller's flag sending messages towards the Messines Ridge, for that, too, lay below us-the abomination of desolation: a long, ragged, yellow-brown scar on the green landscape. Not a vestige of Wytschaete remained, and of Messines only a heap of debris on the southernmost spur of the ridge. Between the two there had once been a triangular wood. Now a few branchless trunks stood up against the gash in the earth that had once been a pretty ridge in a flat country. To-day there was nothing, and it seems impossible that there ever would be anything but the graves, the dead trees, and the hideous yellow

brown scar.

It was extraordinary how clear-cut the line seemed where our trenches had been. Up to them everything was verdant and lovely-beyond them that hideous scar. And yet even that was not as grim as the towers of Ypres with the shells dropping steadily into the debris. All the time we stood on the ridge the firing never ceased. It was one continuous rumble of sound or flash of gun-fire from our own guns just below, and it seemed incredible that all this seemingly peaceful, prosperous country was one vast death-trap. And not only the country, but the air, too, for the aeroplanes came and went, and the anti-aircraft guns fired continuously as we stood there, and also when we clambered down the other side of the ridge to tea in General B——-'s dug-out. For myself, I didn't want tea or anything, except to stand up there and wait till night fell and watch the sky lit with the flashes of the guns and the bursting of the shrapnel overhead. I could have stayed there for hours trying to photograph the whole thing on my mind. Never again will one stand on a high hill and look down on the battle

VOL. LXXI

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fields of the world's greatest war while it was still going on. Never again will one feel that same extraordinary thrill at seeing the battered towers of Ypres amid the summer greenery, with the shells falling steadily among the ruins of the town. If one sees it again, some day, it will be when there is no rumble of travelling shells, no ring of angry machine-guns, no aeroplanes, like great dragon-flies, overhead. There will no longer be miles of transport raising the dust along tree-shaded roads, no camouflage screens at Woesten and Elverdinghe. Poperinghe will not hold its amazing crowd of British soldiers drawn from every corner of the Empire; the Tirpitz battery will have ceased hurling its shells across thirty miles of the Belgian coast. La Panne will no longer harbour a King and Queen in its jerry-built villas. But to us those plains must be hallowed ground, so long as memory holds and gratitude or pride of race burns within our souls, for truly here did England find herself in the splendour of that contemptible little army" which, fighting, falling, and dying in its thousands, barred the path of Germany's bestial hordes in their all-conquering advance.

EVELYN BYNG

THE BOLSHEVIK BEE

MAN is a very prejudiced animal; like all his fellow-vertebrates, except the dog, he judges all other creatures by their usefulness or otherwise to himself, and their intelligence by its subservience to his own. Because his young do not need living but paralysed tissues for their sustenance, the almost miraculous surgery of the Sphex entirely fails to excite his admiration, even when he knows of it, which is not often the case, and since the anesthetic secreted by the glow-worm has never yet been utilized in human clinics, or, for the matter of that, yet been identified by human science, that interesting beetle remains to him merely an insect which emits a rather curious light. Nine men out of ten exalt the intelligence of the dog above that of the cat, not perceiving that their judgment is altogether vitiated by the personal equation, and that they are really placing extreme servility above a fine sense of independence. They assume the dog to be the more intelligent" animal of the two because the dog does what they want and shows signs of pleasure in the process, while they write down the cat as the less "intelligent" because the cat aims at what the cat wants, mostly with singular success, and does not care a brass farthing about their opinion so long as they refrain from throwing things. The dog, an undiscerning courtier, fawns on the master; the cat, with a much keener appreciation of Realpolitik, pays his addresses to the cook; and in the deluded family the dog is judged the wiser animal of the two, which, as Euclid somewhere or other observes, "is absurd."

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But in nothing is this influence of the human equation more apparent than in our attitude toward the bee. It is, I admit, modified by the bee's possession of a sting and an uncertain temper, but, on the whole, these drawbacks are forgotten in the contemplation of the insect as an expert confectioner and chandler, the producer of those two admirable commodities, honey and

wax.

That fact makes an irresistible appeal to humanity, with the result that the bee is held up to us by our pastors and masters as an object of admiration instead of the awful example she really is. It is difficult to discuss the intelligence of the bee, because, whatever it is, the intelligence of all insects is so utterly

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