meadows, the
sunlit dyke roads, and the countless windmills of the Dutch levels.
In those days there was unbroken land from Alkmaar and Leiden to the
Dollart. Three great provinces, South Holland, North Holland, and
Zuiderzeeland, reclaimed at various times between the early tenth
century and 1945 and all many feet below the level of the waves outside
the dykes, spread out their lush polders to the northern sun and
sustained a dense industrious population. An intricate web of laws
and custom and tradition ensured a perpetual vigilance and a perpetual
defence against the beleaguering sea. For more than two hundred and
fifty miles from Walcheren to Friesland stretched a line of embankments
and pumping stations that was the admiration of the world.

If some curious god had chosen to watch the course of events in those
northern provinces while that flanking march of the British was in
progress, he would have found a convenient and appropriate seat for
his observation upon one of the great cumulus clouds that were drifting
slowly across the blue sky during all these eventful days before the
great catastrophe. For that was the quality of the weather, hot and
clear, with something of a breeze, and underfoot dry and a little
inclined to be dusty. This watching god would have looked down upon
broad stretches of sunlit green, sunlit save for the creeping patches
of shadow cast by the clouds, upon sky-reflecting meres, fringed and
divided up by masses of willow and large areas of silvery weeds, upon
white roads lying bare to the sun and upon a tracery of blue canals. The
pastures were alive with cattle, the roads had a busy traffic, of beasts
and bicycles and gaily coloured peasants' automobiles, the hues of the
innumerable motor barges in the canal vied with the eventfulness of the
roadways; and everywhere in solitary steadings, amidst ricks and barns,
in groups by the wayside, in straggling villages, each with its fine old
church, or in compact towns laced with canals and abounding in bridges
and clipped trees, were human habitations.

The people of this country-side were not belligerents. The interests
and sympathies alike of Holland had been so divided that to the end she
remained undecided and passive in the struggle of the world powers. And
everywhere along the roads taken by the marching armies clustered groups
and crowds of impartially observant spectators, women and children in
peculiar white caps and old-fashioned sabot