s, however, occasionally visited by that amazing troupe of variety
artistes, known as the Army Pierrots, who provide the men in billets
with a most delectable entertainment for 50 centimes, the proceeds being
a "deodand," and appropriated to charitable uses. For all that, Bailleul
stinks in the nostrils of fatigue-parties.

Bethune is like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land, for it is
the rendezvous of the British Army, and men tramp miles to warm their
hands at its fires of social life. Its _patisserie_ has the choicest
cakes, and its hairdresser's the most soothing unguents of any town in
our occupation. It has a great market-place, where the peasants do a
thriving business every Saturday, producing astonished rabbits by the
ears from large sacks, like a conjuror, and holding out live and
plaintive fowls for sensual examination by pensive housewives. Also it
has a town-hall in which I once witnessed the trial by court-martial of
a second-lieutenant in the R.A.M.C. for ribaldry in his cups and conduct
unbecoming an officer and a gentleman--a spectacle as melancholy as it
is rare, and of which the less said the better. It has a church with
some lurid glass of indifferent quality, and (if I remember rightly) a
curious dovecote of a tower. The transepts are hemmed in by shops and
warehouses. To the mediaevalist there is nothing strange in such
neighbourliness of the world and the Church. The great French churches
of the Middle Ages--witness Notre Dame d'Amiens with its inviting
ambulatory--were places of municipal debate, and their sculpture was, to
borrow the bold metaphor of Viollet-le-Duc, a political "liberty of
speech" at a time when the chisel of the sculptor might say what the pen
of the scrivener dared not, for fear of the common hangman, express.
Bethune is not the only place where I have seen shops coddling churches,
and the conjunction was originally less impertinent than it now seems.
It was not that the Church was profaned, but that the world was
consecrated; honest burgesses trading under the very shadow of the
flying buttresses were reminded that usury was a sin, and that to charge
a "just price" was the beginning of justification by works. But I have
not observed that the shopkeepers of Bethune now entertain any very
mediaeval compunction about charging the British soldier an unjust
price.

Armentieres is on the high road to Lille, but at present there is no
thoroughfare. It's a dispiriting town