We found our hotel in the most perfect of little market squares, with a Renaissance town-hall on one side, and on the other a miniature Spanish palace with a front of rosy brick adorned by grey carvings.  The square was crowded with English army motors and beautiful prancing chargers; and the restaurant of the inn (which has the luck to face the pink and grey palace) swarmed with khaki tea-drinkers turning indifferent shoulders to the widest view in Europe.  It is one of the most detestable things about war that everything connected with it, except the death and ruin that result, is such a heightening of life, so visually stimulating and absorbing.  “It was gay and terrible,” is the phrase forever recurring in “War and Peace”; and the gaiety of war was everywhere in Cassel, transforming the lifeless little town into a romantic stage-setting full of the flash of arms and the virile animation of young faces.

From the park on top of the hill we looked down on another picture.  All about us was the plain, its distant rim merged in northern sea-mist; and through the mist, in the glitter of the afternoon sun, far-off towns and shadowy towers lay steeped, as it seemed, in summer quiet.  For a moment, while we looked, the vision of war shrivelled up like a painted veil; then we caught the names pronounced by a group of English soldiers leaning over the parapet at our side.  “That’s Dunkerque”—­one of them pointed it out with his pipe—­“and there’s Poperinghe, just under us; that’s Furnes beyond, and Ypres and Dixmude, and Nieuport...  “And at the mention of those names the scene grew dark again, and we felt the passing of the Angel to whom was given the Key of the Bottomless Pit.

That night we went up once more to the rock of Cassel.  The moon was full, and as civilians are not allowed out alone after dark a staff-officer went with us to show us the view from the roof of the disused Casino on top of the rock.  It was the queerest of sensations to push open a glazed door and find ourselves in a spectral painted room with soldiers dozing in the moonlight on polished floors, their kits stacked on the gaming tables.  We passed through a big vestibule among more soldiers lounging in the half-light, and up a long staircase to the roof where a watcher challenged us and then let us go to the edge of the parapet.  Directly below lay the unlit mass of the town.  To the northwest a single sharp hill, the “Mont des Cats,” stood out against the sky; the rest of the horizon was unbroken, and floating in misty moonlight.  The outline of the ruined towns had vanished and peace seemed to have won back the world.  But as we stood there a red flash started out of the mist far off to the northwest; then another and another flickered up at different points of the long curve.  “Luminous bombs thrown up along the lines,” our guide explained; and just then, at still another point a white light opened like a tropical flower, spread to full bloom and drew itself back into the night.  “A flare,” we were told; and another white flower bloomed out farther down.  Below us, the roofs of Cassel slept their provincial sleep, the moonlight picking out every leaf in the gardens; while beyond, those infernal flowers continued to open and shut along the curve of death.