The challenge of the dead

BOOKS BY STEPHEN GRAHAM A Vagabond in the Caucasus Undiscovered Russia A Tramp's Sketches Changing Russia With the Russian Pilgrims to Jerusalem With Poor Emigrants to America Russia and the World The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary Through Russian Central Asia Priest of the Ideal Russia in 1916 The Quest of the Face A Private in the Guards Children of the Slaves The Challenge of the Dead

The suns shines and a strong wind lifts the waves toward the land; the blue sea, in happy commotion, throws armfuls of white spray across the long stone breakwater which is called Zeebruges Mole. The white stone way goes two miles out to sea, and is swept by a marine healthiness. Upon it at intervals stand the German guns with the ends of their barrels burst out like thistle-heads. They point o'er the sea; they have their armoured shelter on the inner side of which on the level with the gunner's eye stand inscribed in neat German schrift the distances to all places of importance within gunshot—greenish-yellow camouflaged German guns with something of the tiger in their expression. On the lee side of the Mole cling the giant sheds of hydroplanes—as it were, hooked to the side of the great stone wall. In the quieter water on this side of the Mole one sees jutting out of the fairway the tops of vessels sunk there in 1918, and near by is a tablet marking the spot where the landing-party of the Vindictive made its daring raid upon the foe.
Zeebruges! A party of school-children in croc are being escorted along the way by nuns; the Smiths of Surbiton have scrawled their names on the guns. There is a half-way house on the Mole now where one drinks beer and buys a picture postcard, or at the base of the Mole and looking outward toward England, one may dine alfresco at a Grand Palace Hotel. But what of that! The whole is sun-drowned and wind-swept and bare and open with a spaciousness and grandeur which are ample for the soul. The breeze which blows from England slackens nothing ere it reaches those fields where the wild flowers and the rushes bloom.