"Well, here I am and here I remain," says an old man sitting behind me with a coffee-glass which he has long since drained. "Till England becomes sane, I stay here."
"The cost of living is just as high in Peebles as in London," says a woman sitting opposite him.
"Mad everywhere," says the man. "What I'd like is a flat somewhere near Lancaster Gate, so as I could go out into Kensington Gardens and sit under the trees and smoke."
There was a pause.
Then the woman from Peebles ventured in a thin, small voice:
"I think that Peter Pan statue in Kensington is so sweet. It was put up in the night, wasn't it?"
"Yes, it was; and isn't Kensington a delightful place?" says the old man.
They gloated in silence over Kensington. The bells of the Belfry began selections from Faust. Is there a war on? men used to ask facetiously. "There never was any war," says Bruges. The sound of the boots has long since died away, the boots, boots, boots, boots, marching up and down again, away, away—this city was not delivered unto the Angel of Death.
It's a shady highway that goes eastward to Ostende. At the village of St. Andrews there is a first war memorial to Belgian soldiers who gave their lives in the war; and then you come to the open ground at Varssenaere where the 20th Brigade did outpost duty, the first resting-ground for many a man, if rest he could, on his first night on the terrain of war—Varssenaere, a mean red-brick village with estaminets and small shops. Next day 'twas Steine and then Ostende.
October 9, 1914, they marched into Ostende station, crowded with wounded men who had been rushed down from the stricken front. Antwerp had fallen. The trains which brought the wounded down took the new army back—back to Bruges, on to Ghent, and tumbled it out into that great old city. The streets were full of refugees, but the khaki tide rolled forward through the crowds, past the cathedral, out by the Lokeren road, to meet the foe.