I dare say I described her to you in letters, or when I got back to England after that trip. The most wonderful old lady who ever lived! She didn't welcome her customers at all. She just sat and knitted. She had an architectural sort of face, framed with a crust of snow—I mean, a frilled cap! And if one furtively stared, she looked at one down her nose, and made one feel cheap and small as if one had snored, or hiccupped out aloud in a cathedral! But it seems I won her esteem by enquiring if "les cœurs d'Arras" had a history. Nobody else had ever shown enough intelligence to care! So she gave me the history of the cakes, and of everything else in Arras; also, before we went away, she escorted Brian and me into a marvellous cellar beneath her shop. It went down three storeys and had fireplaces and a well! The earth under La Grande Place was honeycombed with such souterrains, she said. They'd once been quarries, in days so old as to be forgotten—quarries of "tender stone" (what a nice expression!), and the people of Arras had cemented and made them habitable in case of bombardment. They must have been useful in 1914!
As for the cakes, they were invented by an abbess who was sent to Spain. Before reluctantly departing, she gave the recipe to her successor, saying she "left her heart in Arras." According to the legend (the old shop-lady assured me) a girl who had never loved was certain to fall in love within a month after first eating a Heart of Arras. Well, Padre, I ate almost a hundred hearts, and less than a month after I met Jim!
You may believe that I asked Brian and Father Beckett a dozen questions at once about dear Arras. But alas, alas! all the answers were sad.
The beautiful belfry? Only a phantom remaining. The Hôtel de Ville? Smashed. La Grande Place—La Petite Place? Stone quarries above ground as well as below, the old Flemish façades crumbled like sheets of barley sugar. The arcades? Ruined. The charming old shops? Vanished. The seller of Hearts? Dead. But the Hearts—they still existed! The children of Arras who have come back "since the worst was over" (that is their way of putting it!) would not feel that life was life without the Arras Hearts. Besides, Arras without the Hearts would be like the Altar of the Vestal Virgins without the ever-burning lamp. So they are still baked, and still eaten, those brave little Hearts of Arras—and Brian asked Father Beckett to bring me a box.
They bought it of a cousin of my old woman, an ancient man who had lurked in a cellar during the whole of the bombardment. He said that all Arras knew, in September, 1914, how the Kaiser had vowed to march into the town in triumph, and how, when he found the place as hard to take "as quicksilver is to grasp," he revenged himself by destroying its best-beloved treasures. He must have rejoiced that July day of 1915, when Wolff's Agency was able to announce at last, that the Abbey of St. Waast and its museum were in flames!
As the gray car bumped on to Bethune, Vimy Ridge floated blue in the far distance, to the right of the road, and Father Beckett and Brian took off their hats to it. Still farther away, and out of sight lay Lens, in German possession, but practically encircled by the British. The Old Contemptible had been there, and described the town as having scarcely a roof left, but being an "ant heap" of Boches, who swarm in underground shelters bristling with machine guns. Between Lens and the road stood the celebrated Colonne de Condé, showing where the prince won his great victory over Spain; and farther on, within gun-sound distance though out of sight, lay Loos, on the Canal de l'Haute Deule. Who thinks nowadays of its powerful Cistercian Abbey, that dominated the country round? Who thinks twice, when travelling this Appian Way which Germany has given France, of any history which began or ended before the year 1914?
Bethune they found still existing as a town. It has been bombarded often but not utterly destroyed, and from there they ran out four miles to Festubert, because the little that the Germans have left of the thirteenth-century church and village, burns with an eternal flame of interest.
Bethune itself was a famous fortress once, full of history and legend: but isn't the whole country in its waste and ruin, like a torn historic banner, crusted with jewels—magic jewels, which cannot be stolen by enemy hands?
On the way to Ypres—crown and climax of the tour—the car passed Lillers and Hazebrouck, places never to be forgotten by hearts that beat in the battles of Flanders. Then came the frontier at Steenwoorde; and they were actually in Belgium, passing Poperinghe to Ypres, the most famous British battleground of the war.
When Brian was fighting, and when you were on earth, Padre, everyone talked about the "Ypres Salient." Now, though for soldiers Ypres will always be the "salient" since the battle of Wytschaete Ridge, the material salient has vanished. Yet the same trenches exist, in the same gray waste which Brian used to paint in those haunting, impressionist war sketches of his that all London talked about, after the Regent Street exhibition that he didn't even try for leave to see! The critics spoke of the mysterious, spiritual quality of his work, which gave "without sentimentality" picturesqueness to the shell-holes and mud, the shattered trees and wooden crosses, under eternally dreaming skies.