20 
LAND & WATER 
Amiens in War Time 
By An OflScer 
May 31, 1917 
E\T£N in peace time, Amiens is one of the most 
agreeable cities in the whole of France. With 
a light-hearted atmosphere, an atmosphere of good 
tood, good shops, and clean streets, it combines 
the cloistral simplicity of a cathedral town. It is the sort of 
place where everylx)dy stays a nigjit. 
It is a curiously definite town. ' It does not straggle, but 
begins like a compact block of buildings and ends, as it were, 
with the last house. You enter it by a long leafy boulevard 
full of children and nurserymaids — or rather those merry, 
hatle§s, shawl-covered girls who take their place in France, 
who wheel perambulators and herd babies. Immediately 
— leavi.ig behind the malaise of theSomme, its flies and stinks, 
its indefinable atmosphere of stale war — you seem to enter 
(how shall 1 say it ?) the new zest, the holiday spirit of Amiens. 
That — and a kind of friendUness and the renewal of acquaint- 
ance with civilisation — is what makes it so attractive to the 
man from the trenches. At first, you feel strange, exotic, 
out-of-place. It is as though — in faded and very disre- 
putable khaki^you had suddenly been dropped by an 
aeroplane in the centre of a great European city hundreds 
of miles from the war. It is as though after a long day's 
shooting you had strolled into a London dra\ying-rooin. 
At the same time, this is a very charm ng feeling. It is 
delightful to see men running about in billycock hats and 
dark clothes — even French billycocks ; it is interesting to see 
trams and fashionably-dressed women and big bright shops. 
It is extraordinary to hear the sound of the trams — that 
indefinably civihsed sound, witli associations of the " Elephant 
and Castle" and the Vauxhall Bridge Road on wet days — of 
the fiacres rattling past, of the feet tapping the pavement, 
of the street-vendors seUing newspapers and tilings. 
Sunday Scenes 
Such crowds in the broad main street — ^it might be Paris 
in the height of an extraordinary season, only there are more 
uniforms here. Everywhere the vivid sky blue of the French 
officers ; one feels that they might have stepped straight 
ftom the pages of La Vie Parisienne. It is Sunday, and for 
their visit to town they have put on all their crosses, medals, 
and what not. Most of them — especially the Flying Corps 
officers — are wearing four or five decorations. Occasionally 
you will see dark green uniforms with gold facings — 
probably those of Engineers, Poilus, too, are numerous — 
poilus m tin hats, and sturdy httle Chasseurs Alpins, 
with rakish tafti-'o-shanters.- Now and then you- meet 
enormous negroes from the Colonial Corps wearing a kind 
of fez — great grinning fellows, standing 6 ft. 3 in., 
with broad flat noses and thick red lips ; and Zouaves 
in short jackets and baggy pantalons. Belgians there 
are also, and, of course, a large sprinking of English khaki. 
Here comes a Sikh on horseback. To this varied throng, 
Australians with their slouch hats, and Canadians, all coppery- 
faced and sun-tanned, bring a suggestion of far-distant climes. 
Civihans, smartly dressed little ladies in the latest from 
Paris, showing plenty of open-work stocking and shapely 
limb, trip along in two's and three's naively laughing and ex- 
changing jokes — always laughing. Soberly-dressed, com- 
fortable looking gentitmjn carrying heavily-tasselled um- 
brellas, wife on arm — some wife — are taking their Sunday 
morning promenade ; they bow to each other solemnly across 
the road. Doubtless they are the chief tradesmen or municipal 
officials of the town. Tlie trees of the gardens at the further 
end of the main street look green and cool, and a number of 
people are strolling beneath them or sitting contentedly 
on the seats. There is even to be seen that delightful and 
unchanging Frenchman who, since the beginning of time, has 
sat under the trees of a public garden, reading a newspaper. 
Nor is there any lack of wheeled traffic. The main street 
simply shrieks with it. Enormous motor-cars, usually con- 
taining English or French generals or French Flying Corps 
officers, constantly rush past at breakneck speed, hooting 
furiously. Fiacres rattle briskly over the cobble-stones. 
Motor bicyles add greatly to the noise of the thoroughfare 
and do their best to knock everybody down within reach ; 
bicycles — without whicli no French town would be complete 
— tear in and out among the other vehicles, creating by their 
frantic bcll-ringing a S])ecial frenzy of their own. Although 
it is Sunday, most of the shops are open and their coloured 
awnings in the brilliant sunshine, lend a summery aspect to 
the scene. Already the cafts are crammed and — quite in the 
dear old manner of \ersailles or the Avenue de I'Opera — 
crowds sit at the. marble top tables amid the little orange 
trees, or out on the pavement, sipping strange coloured drinks. 
Hard to think, as you look down the street, so gay, so sunny 
that barely two years ago it was in the hands of the invader ! 
Hard to think that not twenty miles away one finds the silent 
stink-ridden, death-stricken world of the trenches ! Ah, 
well ! They deserve their fun, these jeitnes hommcs. At 
the same time, one has the fancy that here in this motley 
cosmopolitan throng — not in London or Paris or Petrograd — 
is the living hub of the world to-day. 
After drawing the necessary amount of money at the bank 
and indulging in a hair-cut and a shampoo, we repair to that 
Mecca of subalterns, the Hotel du Rhin. Now there is a 
choice of several hotels in Amiens and some prefer the Belfort 
or its rival next door. For my part, however, I have no 
doubt about the Rhin. Here you get not only an excellent 
luncheon and excellent wines, but you are amused which, 
after all, is the best appetiser. Yes, you get a luncheon 
as well cooked as any ever eaten at the Carlton or the 
Ritz. There is melon, hors d'oeuvres, fish or omelette, 
beefsteak or poulet roti, and glace or anything you like to 
follow. The place is full of officers, French and English, 
but chiefly the latter. Never was an Amiens hotel so animated 
in ordinary times. At a table near by sits a merry party ; 
some young Frenchmen have brought out their wives or 
sweethearts, and they are all chattering at once amid peals of 
laughter. One or two widows may be seen in the peculiarly 
becoming black costumes of their country. Not far away a 
couple of Parisian ladies are sitting ; you can pick them out 
in a moment by their dashing hats, their very short and wide 
frocks, their indefinable air of entei-prising chic. 
We drink coffee on a verandah that looks out over a pleasant 
shady garden, then return to exploration. There is much 
shopping to be done. The chocolate shops in Amiens are 
irresistible and one cannot depart in peace without buying 
some of the delicious " roc " that hterally melts in one's mouth. 
To all outward appearances the town is precisely the same 
as ever, even to the pigeons and jackdaws which circle about 
the Cathedral or chatter raucously from its numerous pinnacles. 
Only when you walk round to the front you discover that 
that wonderful fa9ade is completely sandbagged up. Within 
are to be seen the usual small parties strolling round, but 
most of them now are composed of English or Coloni;J soldiers. 
At the side of the great Cathedral where in a patch of rank 
green grass lie many lichen-grown slabs of stone, tomb-heads 
and the like, it is pleasant to watch the play of sunlight on 
the old grey sacristy and to imagine oneself a tourist again. 
Such a corner could belong to almost any cathedral close of 
England or France. 
Having seen the chief spectacle of the place, we visit the 
shops again, and then sit awhile outside a cafe, watching the 
endlessly varied human stream flow by. After tea we hire a 
fiacre and drive ponderously but happily round the outskirts, 
of the town. The driver is drunk and the chaise rolls solemnly 
from side to side of the road at the nag's pleasure. But what 
matters it — one knows the poor beast can't run away. It is. 
pleasant thus to clatter through some of the narrow, "cobbled, 
old-fashioned streets where the houses, white, pink, and pale- 
green, huddle together in crooked confusion. Here you 
have a different atmosphere to that of the Grande Rue. 
The gamins run beside the chaise, calling for coppers and some- 
how the green Venetian shutters, the snatches of song and the 
whiffs of garlic that come from high narrow windows, remind 
you of Italy. So does the twisting straitness of the streets 
and the hatless young women strolling arm-in-arm with the 
sallow dark-eyed young men. Then it is pleasant to pause 
on the outskirts of the town by the river where {he tall poplars 
stand in rows and to watch the level evening sunbeams 
light up the green flat country beyond ; boats rock lazily on the 
river, people are wandering beside it or lying sleepily about on 
the banks ; it is such a peaceful scene that you might fancy 
yourself in, say, Cambridge, at midsummer. 
Dinner at the " Rhin " is a gorgeous meal. The place is 
packed and brilliantly lighted and the atmosphere one of great 
hilarity. Most of the people who were at dejeuner are here again. 
The champagne is excellent, and if towards the end of the 
evening some of the company have obviously had enough of it, 
well, that is surely the proper spirit in wliich to face a fifteen- 
mile drive. Nobody feels dep/essed, thj.efore, wiien soon after 
ten o'clock the moment comes to leave these gay scenes and 
go out into the inky darkness. Everything is silent and 
deserted now, scarcely a footfall echoes along the street, while 
far away in the Eastern sky you can see the old familiar 
flicker of the guns. 
The carcgirries us swiftly towards them. 
