Poor Péronne! In its glorious days of feudal youth its fortress-castle was invincible. The walls were so thick that in days before gunpowder no assaults could hope to break through them. Down in its underground depths was a dungeon, where trapped enemy princes lay rotting and starving through weary years, never released save by death, unless tortured into signing shameful treaties. The very sound of the name, "Péronne," is an echo of history, as Brian says. Hardly a year-date in the Middle Ages could be pricked by a pin without touching some sensational event going on at that time at Péronne. I remember this from my schooldays; and more clearly still from "Quentin Durward," which I have promised to read aloud to Mother Beckett. I remember the Scottish monks who were established at Péronne in the reign of Clovis. I remember how Charles the Bold of Burgundy (who died outside Nancy's gates) imprisoned wicked Louis XI in a strong tower of the château, one of the four towers with conical roofs, like extinguishers of giant candles and kingly reputations! I remember best of all the heroine of Péronne, Catherine de Poix, "la belle Péronnaise," who broke with her own hand the standard of Charles's royal flag, in the siege of 1536, threw the bearer into the fosse, and saved the city.
When Wellington took the fortress in 1814, he did not desecrate or despoil the place: it was left for the Germans to do that, just a century later in the progress of civilization! My blood grew hot as I heard from our two men the story of what the new Vandals had done. Just for a moment I almost forgot the secret burning in my heart. The proud pile of historic stone brought to earth at last, like a soldier-king, felled by an axe in his old age: the statue of Catherine thrown from its pedestal, and replaced in mockery by a foolish manikin—this as a mean revenge for what she did to the standard-bearer, most of Charles's men in the siege being Germans, under Henry of Nassau.
"Toujours Francs-Péronnais
Auront bon jour,
Toujours et en tout temps
Francs-Péronnais auront bon temps,"
the girls used to sing in old days as they wove the wonderful linens and tissues of Péronne, or embroidered banners of gorgeous colours to commemorate the saving of the Picard city by Catherine: as Brian repeated to Father Beckett wandering through the ruins redeemed last spring for France by the British. And though Brian's eyes could not see the rubbish-heap where once had soared the citadel he saw through the mystic veil of his blindness many things which others did not see.
It seems that above these marshy flats of the Somme, where the river has wandered away from the hills and disguised itself in shining lakes, gauzy mists always hover. Brian had seen them with bodily eyes, while he was a soldier. Now, with the eyes of his spirit he saw them again, gleaming with the delicate, indescribable colours which only blind eyes can call up to lighten darkness. He saw the fleecy clouds streaming over Péronne like a vast, transparent ghost-banner. He saw on their filmy folds, as if traced in blue and gold and royal purple, the ever famous scene on the walls when Catherine and her following beat back Nassau's men from the one breach where they might have captured the town. And this mystic banner of the spirit Germans can never capture or desecrate. It will wave over Péronne—what was Péronne, and what will again be Péronne—while the world goes on making history for free men.
After Péronne, Bapaume: the battered corpse of Bapaume, murdered in flame that reddened all the skies of Picardy before the British came to chase the Germans out!
In old times, when a place was destroyed the saying was, "Not one stone is left upon another." But in this war, destruction means an avalanche of stones upon each other. Bapaume as Father Beckett saw it, is a Herculaneum unexcavated. Beneath lie buried countless precious things, and still more precious memories; the feudal grandeur of the old château where Philippe-Auguste married proud Isabelle de Hainaut, with splendid ceremony as long ago as 1180: the broken glory of ancient ramparts, where modern lovers walked till the bugles of August 2, 1914, parted them for ever; the arcaded Town Hall, old as the domination of the Spaniards in Picardy; the sixteenth-century church of St. Nicolas with its quaint Byzantine Virgin of miracles: the statue of Faidherbe who beat back the German wave from Bapaume in 1871: all, all burned and battered, and mingled inextricably with débris of pitiful little homes, nobles' houses, rich shops and tiny boutiques, so that, when Bapaume rises from the dead, she will rise as one—even as France has risen.
Of the halting places on this pilgrimage along the British front, I should best have liked to be with Brian and Father Beckett at Arras. Brian and I were there together you know, Padre, on that happy-go-lucky tramping tour of ours—not long before I met Jim. We both loved Arras, Brian and I, and spent a week there in the most fascinating of ancient hotels. It had been a palace; and I had a huge room, big enough for the bedchamber of a princess (princesses should always have bedchambers, never mere bedrooms!) with long windows draped like the walls and stiff old furniture, in yellow satin. I was frightened when an aged servant with the air of a pontiff ushered me in; for Brian and I were travelling "on the cheap." But Arras, though delicious in its quaint charm, never attracted hordes of ordinary tourists. Consequently one could have yellow satin hangings without being beggared.
Oh, how happy we were in that hotel, and in the adorable old town! While Brian painted in the Grande Place and the Petite Place, and sketched the Abbey of St. Waast (who brought Christianity to that part of the world) I wandered alone. I used to stand every evening till my neck ached, staring up at the beautiful belfry, to watch the swallows chase each other back and forth among the bells, whose peal was music of fairyland. And I never tired of wandering through the arcades under the tall old Flemish houses with their overhanging upper storeys, or peeping into the arcades' cool shadows, from the middle of the sunlit squares.
There were some delightful shops in those arcades, where they sold antique Flemish furniture, queer old pictures showing Arras in her proud, treaty-making days (you know what a great place she was for treaty-making!) and lovely faded tapestries said to be "genuinely" of the time when no one mentioned a piece of tapestry save as an "arras." But the shop I haunted was a cake-shop. It was called "Au Cœur d'Arras," because the famous speciality of Arras was a heart-shaped cake; but I wasn't lured there so much by the charm of les cœurs as by that of the person who sold them.