June 20th.

Today our way ran northeast, through a landscape so English that there was no incongruity in the sprinkling of khaki along the road.  Even the villages look English:  the same plum-red brick of tidy self-respecting houses, neat, demure and freshly painted, the gardens all bursting with flowers, the landscape hedgerowed and willowed and fed with water-courses, the people’s faces square and pink and honest, and the signs over the shops in a language half way between English and German.  Only the architecture of the towns is French, of a reserved and robust northern type, but unmistakably in the same great tradition.

War still seemed so far off that one had time for these digressions as the motor flew on over the undulating miles.  But presently we came on an aviation camp spreading its sheds over a wide plateau.  Here the khaki throng was thicker and the familiar military stir enlivened the landscape.  A few miles farther, and we found ourselves in what was seemingly a big English town oddly grouped about a nucleus of French churches.  This was St. Omer, grey, spacious, coldly clean in its Sunday emptiness.  At the street crossings English sentries stood mechanically directing the absent traffic with gestures familiar to Piccadilly; and the signs of the British Red Cross and St. John’s Ambulance hung on club-like facades that might almost have claimed a home in Pall Mall.

The Englishness of things was emphasized, as we passed out through the suburbs, by the look of the crowd on the canal bridges and along the roads.  Every nation has its own way of loitering, and there is nothing so unlike the French way as the English.  Even if all these tall youths had not been in khaki, and the girls with them so pink and countrified, one would instantly have recognized the passive northern way of letting a holiday soak in instead of squeezing out its juices with feverish fingers.

When we turned westward from St. Omer, across the same pastures and watercourses, we were faced by two hills standing up abruptly out of the plain; and on the top of one rose the walls and towers of a compact little mediaeval town.  As we took the windings that led up to it a sense of Italy began to penetrate the persistent impression of being somewhere near the English Channel.  The town we were approaching might have been a queer dream-blend of Winchelsea and San Gimignano; but when we entered the gates of Cassel we were in a place so intensely itself that all analogies dropped out of mind.

It was not surprising to learn from the guide-book that Cassel has the most extensive view of any town in Europe:  one felt at once that it differed in all sorts of marked and self-assertive ways from every other town, and would be almost sure to have the best things going in every line.  And the line of an illimitable horizon is exactly the best to set off its own quaint compactness.