rabbits by the ears from large sacks, like a conjuror, and holding out live and plaintive fowls for sensual examination by pensive housewives.  Also it has a town-hall in which I once witnessed the trial by court-martial of a second-lieutenant in the R.A.M.C. for ribaldry in his cups and conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman—­a spectacle as melancholy as it is rare, and of which the less said the better.  It has a church with some lurid glass of indifferent quality, and (if I remember rightly) a curious dovecote of a tower.  The transepts are hemmed in by shops and warehouses.  To the mediaevalist there is nothing strange in such neighbourliness of the world and the Church.  The great French churches of the Middle Ages—­witness Notre Dame d’Amiens with its inviting ambulatory—­were places of municipal debate, and their sculpture was, to borrow the bold metaphor of Viollet-le-Duc, a political “liberty of speech” at a time when the chisel of the sculptor might say what the pen of the scrivener dared not, for fear of the common hangman, express.  Bethune is not the only place where I have seen shops coddling churches, and the conjunction was originally less impertinent than it now seems.  It was not that the Church was profaned, but that the world was consecrated; honest burgesses trading under the very shadow of the flying buttresses were reminded that usury was a sin, and that to charge a “just price” was the beginning of justification by works.  But I have not observed that the shopkeepers of Bethune now entertain any very mediaeval compunction about charging the British soldier an unjust price.

Armentieres is on the high road to Lille, but at present there is no thoroughfare.  It’s a dispiriting town, given over to industrial pursuits, and approached by rows of mean little cottages such as you may see on the slopes of the mining valleys of South Wales.  Two things stand out in my memory—­one, the spectacle of a corporal being tried for his life in the Town Hall by a court-martial—­there had been a quarrel over a girl in billets and he had shot his comrade; the other the sight of a regiment of Canadians ("Princess Pat’s,” I believe), drawn up in the square for parade one winter afternoon before they went into the trenches for the first time.  And a very gallant and hefty body of men they were.

Poperinghe is a dismal place, and to be avoided.

Hazebrouck is not without some pretentiousness.  It has the largest place of any of them, with a town-hall of imposing appearance, but something of a whited sepulchre for all that.  I remember calling on a civilian dignitary there—­I forget what he was; he sat in a long narrow corridor-like room, all the windows were hermetically sealed, a gas-stove burnt pungently, some fifty people smoked cigarettes, and at intervals the dignitary spat upon the floor and then shuffled his foot over the spot as a concession to public hygiene.  Therefore I did not tarry.  The precincts of the railway-station