Others have turned their attention to automatic flares.  You can get a startling illuminant if you suspend a test-tube containing sulphuric acid in a vessel of chlorate of potash, and it will be all the better if you add a little common sugar and salt.  You balance your test-tube in the hollow of a bamboo stick and fill the top knot of the stick with the chlorate of potash; then you plant your sticks, not too securely, outside your barbed-wire entanglements, and string them together with a trip-wire.  As for the patrolling Hun who bumps against that trip-wire, it were better for him that a millstone were hung round his neck.

This is Higher Education and post-graduate research.  But elementary education is not neglected.  At the H.Q. of the —­th Corps is an O.T.C. where privates in the H.A.C. and the Artists practise the precepts of the Infantry Manual and study night operations in the meadows within sound of the guns.

Truly it is, in the words of the stout Puritan, a nation not slow and dull but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.

XXVIII

THE LITTLE TOWNS OF FLANDERS AND ARTOIS

The little towns of Flanders and Artois are Aire, Hazebrouck, Bethune, Armentieres, Bailleul, Poperinghe, and Cassel.  They are known in the Army vernacular as Air, Hazybrook, Betoon, Arm-in-tears, Ballyhool (occasionally Belial), Poperingy, and Kassel.  The fairest of these is Cassel.  For Cassel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to the fretful wayfarer, “Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will give you rest.”  For upon the hill of Cassel the air is sweet and fresh, the slopes are musical with a faint lullaby of falling showers, as the wind plays among the birches and the poplars, and over all there is a great peace.  The motor-lorries avoid the declivities of Cassel, and the horsemen pass by on the other side.  Some twenty windmills—­no less and perhaps more—­are perched like dovecots on the hill, lifting their sails to the blue sky.  Some day I will seek out a notary at Cassel and will get him to execute a deed of conveyance assigning to me, with no restrictive covenants, the freehold of one of those mills, for I have coveted a mill ever since I succumbed to the enchantments of Lettres de mon moulin.  True, Flanders is not Provence, and the croaking of the frogs, croak they never so amorously, 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.