The rockets shoot up to the height of the cathedral spire and break in coloured lights, the large catherine-wheels are lit, the children clap and chase one another for firework cases.
At two in the morning strings of men and women holding on to one another parade the streets and kick out with their legs, attempting to dance whilst they sing "Tipperary," "Marguerite," "Mademoiselle from Armentières," "Hoe kan het bestaan," the new girls in knee-skirts with spindly legs, the old wives in longer heavier ones, exposing when they dance white baggy drawers like Canterbury bells. At four in the morning there are still ten thousand in the streets; men and women have made circles round trees and lamp-posts, and kick out as they try to roll round; knots of men and girls go staggering past with howls and yells; young Flemish fellows are squeezing girls of twenty and pressing down their cheeks with large-mouthed kisses. At six, in the heavenly radiance of a pure morning, pandemonium still rolls on.
Yes, it is good beer. The first glass of it on a hot day is refreshing—a flagon at lunch does not come amiss. But these men and women sat for hours pouring it in with floating shrimps—glasses, quarts, sitting on low seats with their legs apart, and visibly filling. And this plenitude did not make them weary. Au contraire, beer got into their toes and their knees and their thighs and their fat arms and necks, and expressed itself at all points of the body. I suppose one good reason for running in queues was that all holding on to one another none could fall down. One of the reasons why the bacchanalia continued long after morning-life had supervened was that many had forgotten they had any homes and mostly did not know where they were.
What a night! Six years ago on that other night it was different. Anxiety and foreboding throbbed in these streets. Belgian manhood in arms marched away. The British marched away, and by midnight the last soldier had gone. Suspense ... and then at two in the morning the first German, a motor-cyclist, armed, goggled, covered with dust, vigilant.... And from the dawn German order reigned in Ghent—no bacchanalias.
The army went out by night by many roads, making, however, for Bruges. It fell back for the defence, perhaps, of Bruges and of Ostende. Brussels had fallen, and Ghent—there was not much of Belgium left. The first morning out of Ghent saw the army at Somerghem, and the second at Thielt. So tired were the troops that at each halt in the night both officers and men, lying down by the roadside, fell asleep. At the halts the men bumped into one another mechanically, like the trucks of a freight train coming to a sudden stop, and then they just tumbled down and snored.
Newly tarred barges loll slowly along the Bruges-Ghent canal, and there is a vista along the straight water to the belfry of Ghent and the cathedral. The sides of the canal are lush with verdure; health and happiness spread out from its banks. One would say also the war never was here. But in Somerghem the old church on the hill crowning the town has been blown up. Its tower gave a view for leagues around, and the Devil made good use of it when he had a chance and when he had done his task blew it up lest others should follow his example. The Germans evacuated the town just before the end of the war; the Belgian army bombarded it and placed a gas concentration there. It was retaken, but at the price of a most beautiful church. The inhabitants are all back. They remember the Tommies and, of course, the Scots. The Gordons in their kilts made a lasting impression. Somerghem saw much war life before the enemy marched away, and German soldier life, with its violently repressive military discipline and its correspondingly lax morality, was rife. The more perfect their military obedience the less heed there was of God.
One sees in these parts not a few war-babies, and worse than these, for they are innocent enough, one sees war-children in adolescence. The numbers of depraved young girls is appalling. Perhaps there were many before the war, but they look rather like war products. How many of them there are in the beer-houses and backyards of the small towns! It is difficult to avoid adventures with them. Bertha and Martha, depraved little rascals, come running along the canal bank, one in clogs, one in stocking soles. They talk scraps of German and scraps of French, and make disgusting gestures and throw themselves about in hard, coarse laughter. Martha is a strong and brazen little hussy with red face and fat little arms. Bertha is a soft-witted, pallid slip of a girl with full throat and weak lips. Both have long black finger-nails, both are in cotton rags; but Bertha has a large yellow festering wound on her ankle which she says was caused by a bit of shrapnel. Bertha is the younger. Martha may be sixteen; Bertha would be two years younger. And Martha would get Bertha into trouble. "Take Bertha!" she says continually, suggestively making signs. Poor war-children! When the war began Martha was ten and Bertha was eight. Martha was corrupted in it; pale, sickly, weak-lipped Bertha, with the shrapnel wound, perhaps not actually corrupted. When the wound had been examined and their nails cut they concluded they had met a doctor.
They scamper away at last. The dark water of the canal flows peacefully between banks of untarnished green. Nature is unqualified loveliness. At Somerghem, however, behind this veil there has been war, there has been something of the curse. One begins to notice in old walls patches of new brick where shell-holes in human habitations have been cobbled. Re-pointing is going on. The splash where the splinters of iron rived a whole house has been sought to be gently erased. The most virtuous work in the world! But it splashed on to the children too, and who can re-point the Berthas and the Marthas?
Enfin, the fair-sized town of Thielt, would-be picturesque but surprisingly shabby, not clean, not cleaned up, not quite like Belgium. The dirtiest of all possible hotels, more like a billet than a hotel, unswept floors, smashed china, supper in a kitchen which does not gleam like housewife's honour. It is a town unlike Ghent, unlike Bruges. It has not, however, been much shelled. British and Belgian gunners seem to have had orders to spare friendly cities. But there is no doubt that Thielt was in the war. Half its present inhabitants are revenants, as the French call those pitiful spirits who return to the places where they used to live. Mine host fled to Paris in 1914, and did not make a fortune there; he talks bitterly of Bosches and compensation. He is forty-six and set. Six years ago he felt a young man, he says, but to-day he is not ready to start anything new.
On then towards Roulers! 'Tis in gloomier country and with poor people. All high roads are under repair. If shells spared Thielt, they did not spare the roads. Where British army leather beat the cobbles in that long march back from Ghent, whistling shells touched later and blew up the ground that had been beneath their feet. The patient Flemish farmers hung on to their farms on each side of the shell-pitted road, and their cattle grazed in the fields with an equanimity that was sublime. For four years the cannon-thunder never ceased, and every night war flamed around the heavens, but the men on the soil remained true to the soil and drove straightly their ploughs.