A quiet and little marked country south of Roulers now gives way first to trees not quite dead but sprouting green from black trunks, and then to blasted trees dead to the core. After a mile or so farm-houses and cultivation cease and one enters the terrible battle area of Passchendaele, all pits, all tangled with corroded wire—but now as it were in tumultuous conflict with Nature. Chiefly remarkable are the magnificent rushes with their black tops rising from almost every shell-hole. The stagnancy has not dried up, but festers still in black rot below the rushes. Double shell-holes, treble shell-holes, charred ground, great pits, bashed-in dug-outs, all overgrown with the highest of wild flowers—pink willow-herb, burly St. John's wort in a yellow glare, starry blue of outbreaking chicory, hundred-headed blossoming sweet thistles growing from the hollows where fell, I doubt not, Caledonia's sons, foxgloves flowering upward attempting to take crimson to heaven. Ypres by the compass lies south-west. No, there is nothing on the horizon, not a wall, not a wood, only the bare eminence of Kemmel Hill. Before you is a vast fen. Some Flemings are at work on it in shirt sleeves, but not a soul is traversing it. You constantly change your direction: there is no going directly. It is impassable. You make for what once was a wood; it afforded cover. What is it now—thrice thrashed and riven, the abode of rats, lizards, weasels, a calamitous and precipitous abyss covered with wreckage. Unexploded stick-bombs, rusty grog-bottles, helmets, lie there still in plenty. Weather-beaten ammunition baskets with shells intact lie where they fell off the ammunition waggons or where men dropped them. There are broken rifles, there are graves. There is all but the blood. But from the blood has risen flowers.
On the vast waste you come upon houses built of salvage. Duck-boards have been gathered in, old bits of rusty corrugated iron which sheltered trenches and kept out rain have been collected by the returned Flemish—what a return!—and they have made shacks of shreds and patches. Fierce dogs on chains bark from them; no children venture forth—there are no children there. Heaps of the jetsam of the battlefields are in the yards. The uncouth workers are not too pleased to see any stranger, and look suspiciously at you. They have pistols ready at need. For these oases in the wilderness are not unvisited by robbers, and thieves lurk in old holes in the ground. It has needed courage to come back to your old ten acres. Few of these Flemish are owners; they are only tenants. Their landlords allow them now three years rent free. From the hut made of salvage starts the regeneracy of the land. In an irregular patch round its gates lies the first reclaimed ground, a mere kail yard, a bean plot. There are wonderful crops of beans, higher than beans are wont to grow, bean-stalks to climb up. Tobacco also has been growing, for the leaves hang wilting from green to yellow on the outside of the unpainted wooden walls. But beyond the oasis the tall black-topped reeds, like Guardsmen of the vegetable world, go rank beyond rank to the eyes' end. One comes to a road, and there is what was Zonnebeke resurrected in a tail of diminutive cabins each roofed with corrugated iron, each numbered as a claim for reparation. Not a few of the houses are named thus:—"In den Niewen wereld." Half of them seem to be estaminets.
It is the same at Becelaere. The people earn a living drinking beer in one another's estaminets.
"I wouldn't never have come back had I known it was like this," says a Belgian woman. "I had good job at Rouen all the war, make plenty money, not like this."
"How was that?"
"Me cook in sergeants' mess, huh, plenty food, plenty money."
"That's where you learned English?"
"Yes."
There were two British Tommies drinking beer at the estaminet, one an R.E. the other an R.F. both talking knowingly about the old war. They had a motor-lorry which was waiting outside.