All the afternoon we wandered about La Panne.  The exercises of the troops had begun again, and the deploying of those endless black lines along the beach was a sight of the strangest beauty.  The sun was veiled, and heavy surges rolled in under a northerly gale.  Toward evening the sea turned to cold tints of jade and pearl and tarnished silver.  Far down the beach a mysterious fleet of fishing boats was drawn up on the sand, with black sails bellying in the wind; and the black riders galloping by might have landed from them, and been riding into the sunset out of some wild northern legend.  Presently a knot of buglers took up their stand on the edge of the sea, facing inward, their feet in the surf, and began to play; and their call was like the call of Roland’s horn, when he blew it down the pass against the heathen.  On the sandcrest below my window the lonely sentinel still watched...

June 24th.

It is like coming down from the mountains to leave the front.  I never had the feeling more strongly than when we passed out of Belgium this afternoon.  I had it most strongly as we drove by a cluster of villas standing apart in a sterile region of sea-grass and sand.  In one of those villas for nearly a year, two hearts at the highest pitch of human constancy have held up a light to the world.  It is impossible to pass that house without a sense of awe.  Because of the light that comes from it, dead faiths have come to life, weak convictions have grown strong, fiery impulses have turned to long endurance, and long endurance has kept the fire of impulse.  In the harbour of New York there is a pompous statue of a goddess with a torch, designated as “Liberty enlightening the World.”  It seems as though the title on her pedestal might well, for the time, be transferred to the lintel of that villa in the dunes.

On leaving St. Omer we took a short cut southward across rolling country.  It was a happy accident that caused us to leave the main road, for presently, over the crest of a hill, we saw surging toward us a mighty movement of British and Indian troops.  A great bath of silver sunlight lay on the wheat-fields, the clumps of woodland and the hilly blue horizon, and in that slanting radiance the cavalry rode toward us, regiment after regiment of slim turbaned Indians, with delicate proud faces like the faces of Princes in Persian miniatures.  Then came a long train of artillery; splendid horses, clattering gun-carriages, clear-faced English youths galloping by all aglow in the sunset.  The stream of them seemed never-ending.  Now and then it was checked by a train of ambulances and supply-waggons, or caught and congested in the crooked streets of a village where children and girls had come out with bunches of flowers, and bakers were selling hot loaves to the sutlers; and when we had extricated our motor from the crowd, and climbed another hill, we came on another cavalcade surging toward us through the wheat-fields.  For over an hour the procession poured by, so like and yet so unlike the French division we had met on the move as we went north a few days ago; so that we seemed to have passed to the northern front, and away from it again, through a great flashing gateway in the long wall of armies guarding the civilized world from the North Sea to the Vosges.