get a
startling illuminant if you suspend a test-tube containing sulphuric
acid in a vessel of chlorate of potash, and it will be all the better if
you add a little common sugar and salt. You balance your test-tube in
the hollow of a bamboo stick and fill the top knot of the stick with
the chlorate of potash; then you plant your sticks, not too securely,
outside your barbed-wire entanglements, and string them together with a
trip-wire. As for the patrolling Hun who bumps against that trip-wire,
it were better for him that a millstone were hung round his neck.

This is Higher Education and post-graduate research. But elementary
education is not neglected. At the H.Q. of the --th Corps is an O.T.C.
where privates in the H.A.C. and the Artists practise the precepts of
the _Infantry Manual_ and study night operations in the meadows within
sound of the guns.

Truly it is, in the words of the stout Puritan, a nation not slow and
dull but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent,
subtle and sinewy, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that
human capacity can soar to.

XXVIII

THE LITTLE TOWNS OF FLANDERS AND ARTOIS

The little towns of Flanders and Artois are Aire, Hazebrouck, Bethune,
Armentieres, Bailleul, Poperinghe, and Cassel. They are known in the
Army vernacular as Air, Hazybrook, Betoon, Arm-in-tears, Ballyhool
(occasionally Belial), Poperingy, and Kassel. The fairest of these is
Cassel. For Cassel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable
plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to
the fretful wayfarer, "Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will
give you rest." For upon the hill of Cassel the air is sweet and fresh,
the slopes are musical with a faint lullaby of falling showers, as the
wind plays among the birches and the poplars, and over all there is a
great peace. The motor-lorries avoid the declivities of Cassel, and the
horsemen pass by on the other side. Some twenty windmills--no less and
perhaps more--are perched like dovecots on the hill, lifting their
sails to the blue sky. Some day I will seek out a notary at Cassel and
will get him to execute a deed of conveyance assigning to me, with no
restrictive covenants, the freehold of one of those mills, for I have
coveted a mill ever since I succumbed to the enchantments of _Lettres de
mon moulin_. True, Flanders is not Provence, and the croaking of the
frogs, croak they never so am