Mr. Bevan called at 10 o’clock with the faithful MacEwan, and we went first to the Cabour hospital, which I always like so much, and where the large pleasure-grounds make things healthy and quiet for the patients.  Then we had a tyre out of order, so had to go on to Dunkirk, where I met Mr. Sarrel and his friend Mr. Hanson—­Vice-Consul at Constantinople—­and they lunched with us while the car was being doctored.

At last we started towards Nieuport, but before we got there we found a motor-car in a ditch, and its owner with a cut on his head and his arm broken, so we had to pick him up and take him to Coxide.  It was a clear, bright day, with all the trees swishing the sky, and Mr. Bevan and MacEwan did nothing all the time but tell me how dangerous it was, and they pointed out every place on the road where they had picked up dead men or found people blown to pieces.  This was lively for me, and the amusing part of it was that I think they did it from a belated sense of responsibility.

It is as difficult to find words to describe Nieuport as it is to talk of metaphysics in slang.  The words don’t seem invented that will convey that haunting sense of desolation, that supreme quiet under the shock of continually firing guns.  Hardly anything is left now of the little homely bits that, when I saw the place last autumn, reminded one that this was once a city of living human beings. Then one saw a few interiors—­exposed, it is true, and damaged, but still of this world.  Now it is one big grave, the grave of a city, and the grave of many of its inhabitants.  Here, at a corner house, nine ladies lie under the piled-up debris that once made their home.  There some soldiers met their death, and some crumbling bricks are heaped over them too.  The houses are all fallen—­some outer walls remain, but I hardly saw a roof left—­and everywhere there are empty window-frames and skeleton rafters.

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I never knew so surely that a town can live and can die, and it set one wondering whether Life means a thing as a whole and Death simply disintegration.  A perfect crystal, chemists tell us, has the elements of life in it and may be said to live.  Destruction and decay mean death; separation and disintegration mean death.  In this way we die, a crystal dies, a flower or a city dies.  Nieuport is dead.  There isn’t a heart-beat left to throb in it.  Thousands and thousands of shells have fallen into it, and at night the nightingale sings there, and by day the river flows gently under the ruined bridge.  Every tree in a wood near by is torn and beheaded; hardly one has the top remaining.  The new green pushes out amongst the blackened trunks.

One speaks low in Nieuport, the place is so horribly dead.