Poperinghe, though little injured, is almost empty.  In its tidy desolation it looks like a town on which a wicked enchanter has laid a spell.  We roamed from quarter to quarter, hunting for some one to show us the way to the convent I was looking for, till at last a passer-by led us to a door which seemed the right one.  At our knock the bars were drawn and a cloistered face looked out.  No, there were no cushions there; and the nun had never heard of the order we named.  But there were the Penitents, the Benedictines—­we might try.  Our guide offered to show us the way and we went on.  From one or two windows, wondering heads looked out and vanished; but the streets were lifeless.  At last we came to a convent where there were no nuns left, but where, the caretaker told us, there were cushions—­a great many.  He led us through pale blue passages, up cold stairs, through rooms that smelt of linen and lavender.  We passed a chapel with plaster saints in white niches above paper flowers.  Everything was cold and bare and blank:  like a mind from which memory has gone.  We came to a class room with lines of empty benches facing a blue-mantled Virgin; and here, on the floor, lay rows and rows of lace-cushions.  On each a bit of lace had been begun—­and there they had been dropped when nuns and pupils fled.  They had not been left in disorder:  the rows had been laid out evenly, a handkerchief thrown over each cushion.  And that orderly arrest of life seemed sadder than any scene of disarray.  It symbolized the senseless paralysis of a whole nation’s activities.  Here were a houseful of women and children, yesterday engaged in a useful task and now aimlessly astray over the earth.  And in hundreds of such houses, in dozens, in hundreds of open towns, the hand of time had been stopped, the heart of life had ceased to beat, all the currents of hope and happiness and industry been choked—­not that some great military end might be gained, or the length of the war curtailed, but that, wherever the shadow of Germany falls, all things should wither at the root.

The same sight met us everywhere that afternoon.  Over Furnes and Bergues, and all the little intermediate villages, the evil shadow lay.  Germany had willed that these places should die, and wherever her bombs could not reach her malediction had carried.  Only Biblical lamentation can convey a vision of this life-drained land.  “Your country is desolate; your cities are burned with fire; your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.”

Late in the afternoon we came to Dunkerque, lying peacefully between its harbour and canals.  The bombardment of the previous month had emptied it, and though no signs of damage were visible the same spellbound air lay over everything.  As we sat alone at tea in the hall of the hotel on the Place Jean Bart, and looked out on the silent square and its lifeless shops and cafes, some one suggested that the hotel would be a convenient centre for the excursions we had planned, and we decided to return there the next evening.  Then we motored back to Cassel.