Cassel is approached by a winding road that turns and returns upon itself like a corkscrew, and is bordered by an avenue of trees.  It has a bandstand—­what town in Flanders and Artois has not?—­and a church.  Cheek by jowl with the church is a place of convenience, which seems to me profane in more senses than one.  I have never been able to make up my mind whether such secularisation of a church wall is the expression of anti-clerical antipathies, or of a clerical common-sense peculiarly French in its practical and unblushing acceptance of the elementary facts of life.  But about Cassel I am not so sure.  The sight of that shameless annexe is too familiar in France to please our fastidious English tastes—­it seems to express a truculent nonconformity, it is too like a dissenting chapel-of-ease.

     Wherever God erects a house of prayer
     The devil always builds a chapel there.

I have never had the courage to solve my uncertainties by buttonholing a Frenchman and asking him what is the truth of the matter.  I am sure Anatole France could supply me with any number of whimsical explanations, all of them suggestive, and not one of them true.

But, except for this sauciness, Cassel is a demure and pleasant place.

Bailleul is mean in comparison, though it has a notable church tower in which there are traces of some Byzantine imagination brought hither, perhaps, by a Spanish Army of occupation.  Also it has a tea-room which is the trysting-place of all the officers in billets, and the chatelaine of which answers your lame and halting French in nimble English.  On the road to Locre it has those Baths and Wash-houses which have become so justly famous, and whence hosts of British soldiers come forth like Naaman white as snow, but infinitely more companionable.  Almost any day you may see a bathing-towel unit marching thither or thence in column of route, their towels held at the slope or the trail as it pleases their fancy.  And in a field outside Bailleul I have seen open-air smithies and the glow of hot coals, the air resounding with the clink of hammers upon the anvil—­a cheering spectacle on a wet and inclement winter’s day.  But Bailleul has few amenities and no charms.  It is, however, occasionally visited by that amazing troupe of variety artistes, known as the Army Pierrots, who provide the men in billets with a most delectable entertainment for 50 centimes, the proceeds being a “deodand,” and appropriated to charitable uses.  For all that, Bailleul stinks in the nostrils of fatigue-parties.

Bethune is like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land, for it is the rendezvous of the British Army, and men tramp miles to warm their hands at its fires of social life.  Its patisserie has the choicest cakes, and its hairdresser’s the most soothing unguents of any town in our occupation.  It has a great market-place, where the peasants do a thriving business every Saturday, producing astonished