14 
L\ND & WATER 
December 13, 1917 
cheap watering place combined ; a small scale Portsmouth 
and Southsca. It lias a firvv dilapidated streets that might 
be ealk-d quaint, but are more dirty than picturesque. There is 
the usual esplanade, the flash hotels, the grimy cafes, cheerless 
lodging houses, and behind the sea front streets of featureless 
\'illas and grubby shops. Continental visitors lose nothing by 
passing straight through Flushing. It may have been a 
line town once, but its churches, stadhiiis, and old houses were 
destroyed by the futile Eni^lish bombardment in 1809. 
We rrossed the Honte of NWsterscheide, which lies between 
the island of Walcheren and the strip of Dutch territory on 
the mainland south of the estuarv of the Scheldt. It is open 
to the North Sea and its waters are never calm, except in the 
linest weather. 'Ihe tides are swift and treacherous, and the 
channels between the sand banks narrow and intricate.- 
.\fter an hour's plunging through a lieavv lop we put into a 
little fishing village on the Mainland. There are disadvantages 
to Dutch fishing villages, .^t low tide the oozy mud, polluted 
with the refuse of the smacks and trawlers, smells unpleasantly, 
and at night mosquitoes swarm in thousands. The skipper 
was. however, quite happy. He seemed to enjoy the smell ; 
he had found a distant relation in one of the barges, and the 
insect plague troubled him not at all. 
Off Flushing 
We fully expected to find the tide against us all the next 
day. But our fears were groundless, and early next morning 
we were under way, tacking towards Terneuzen. A cruiser 
was steaming up and down off Flushing, her decks cleared, 
her turrets trained, and the crew invisible, every man at 
firing quarters. We could hear the steady clink of ft small 
hammer on an anvil, and an occasional pipe, or bugle, 01 ring- 
ing of a bell— familiar warship sounds. At length she started 
liring ; sub-calibre at three fi.wd targets. The first salvo 
fill short, but after that it was impossible to judge what shoot- 
ing she made. _ W'g were passing in opposite directions, and 
soon she was a" grey hull in the mist that hung over the dis- 
tances. The wind dropped, and th(> sun had driven the few 
clouds to the horizon where th^j' hovered sullenly, a wall of 
p\irple vapour. Flushing, astern of us, grew indistinct. 
Its roofs and chimneys, the small forest of masts, and the big 
skeleton cranes, enveloped in mist and smoke, were vague as 
the distnce in a Turner seascape. 
There is nothing more delightful than the indolence of a 
sailing craft on such days. The gentle movement, the tem- 
])eratc warmth of the blue water, and its lazy clack and gurgle 
against the ship, lull the senses. Books are turned over idly, 
and after a few pages the most skilful novel can no longer keep 
its hold. It falls quietly to one side, and dreams, shapeless 
dreams, of feeling more than thought or vision lay their gently 
numbing hands upon the brain. 
At length, towards noon, a light breeze filled the sails that 
hacT been flapping idly in the wind, and we headed for the 
shore. A shadowy blurr of trees and houses and ships was 
slowly disentangled as we approached, and became a common- 
place Dutch harbour, called Terneuzen. We spent the rest 
of the day there, and found it a featureless little town. It 
was mildly interesting to two of us interned British officers, 
for it was here that we had been taken three years before, 
when w'c crossixl the frontier after the retreat from Antwerp. 
Someone wanted to send a telegram, and the post office was 
utterly unchanged since our first visit, even to the grim 
Kaemaekers' poster of a consumptive boy being sounded by a 
doctor. Terneuzen is prospennis but not bustling, and quite 
ugly. Over the other side of the harbour we wandered amid 
the dismantled system of eartli ramparts that had once 
defended the town and guarded the passage of the Scheldt. 
Now trees were planted on tJie grhss banks, and the water 
in the silent moats was stagnant and overgrown with weed. 
Towards dark, clouds absorbed the whole sky and all the 
fresh heat of the day turned to oppressiveness. Distant 
objects seemed distinct and near ; the wind had dropped, 
and a ground .swell beat sullenly at set intervals upon the sea- 
wall outside the harbour. It was as tliough the god of storms 
were consciously reproducing the dictum of a pilotage hand- 
book upon the signs of an approaching cyclone. The dis- 
turbance came up slowly, and next morning — again it verified 
the liandbook — there were gusts of wind, a choppy sea and 
drizzling showers. Witli one reef in her sails our craft rode 
gaily through the lop, the spray flying over her deck. 
In the afternoon wc entered another straight canal, whose 
entrance was a larger rei)lica of the locks at Walcheren. 
Then the rain came down in earnest, a soft soaking drizzle that 
lasts from five to fifty hours. But in Holland there is no lack 
of rain of every kind ; the torrential shower, the wind blown 
flownpour, and the silent Sconish mist are about equally 
represented in the course of the four seasons. We lay under 
the shadow of iron gates, made fast to a granite wall that rose 
forty feet above us, and waited for a tow. The landing stage 
of tiie little" harbour at the end of the canal was filled with 
barges, for every craft on the Zeeland waters had run for 
shelter. The wind had risen to a gale, and at intervals smash- 
ing showers swept over us. The clouds raced across the sky 
like a multitude of panic-stricken giants. Now and then 
there was brilliant lightning and the thunder rolled above the 
bluster of the storm. The barges around us held an angry 
altercation because one delinquent had announced his in- 
tention of sailing next morning and all the others had agreed 
upou a day in harbour. For the next twenty-four hours the 
wind was high, but towards evening the clouds were broken. 
The massive continents of grey had been dispersed and white 
islands .scudded over the ocean of blue. 
Wo explored the village where we lay stormbound. It 
was a primitive place unknown to tourists and exploiters. 
We were taken into a room behind a small stationer's shop, 
paved from floor to ceiling with blue Delft tiles. Many of the 
oldest and most highly-prized pattern, were rough Biblical 
pictures. This (juaint but crude porcelain is fashionable now , 
hut their owner did not know their value, and furniture and 
curtains hid many of the best specimens. The whole house 
was scrupulously clean ; clean even for Holland, where the 
housewives are unremitting in the labour they expend in 
washing, polishing and dusting. In the kitchen, pots and 
pans were bright as mirrors, ancl the table was still damp from 
scrubbing after the mid-day meal. Out in the scullery the 
bricks on the sloping floor had been worn uneven by the 
continual application of soap and .sand and water. There was 
a shelf of old books, btit it contained no collectors' gems ; 
only seventeenth and eighteenth century volumes of sermons 
and theology, including Baxter and other English Puritans, 
translated into Dutch. The proprietress, a sad-faced woman, 
showed us her treasures with wan pride. From a heavy 
walnut cupboard she produced white caps trimmed with old 
Flemish lace that had been the property of her mother, and 
native jewellery of gold with drop pearls. One feared the 
invasion of the antique dealer and his shrewd bargaining with 
these peasants. 
Even in these forgotten villages tlie old national costume 
is falling into disuse. So strong is the cloth that dresses are 
handed down from mother to daughter, but new ones are 
seldom made. Cheap drapers, With their ugly fripperies arc 
enterprising, and their false lace and ribbons and jewellery 
exercise here, as everywhere, an unholy fascination. 
The gale finally blew itself out that night, and we started 
as early next morning as the tide allowed us. There was the 
familiar freshness after a storm, the air cool, a steady breeze, 
and a few drifting clouds. A fleet of various craft was under ■ 
way after the enforced imprisonment. Stout tugs had in tow 
long hulks laden with coal or hay or gravel, and there were 
numberless sailing barges with green or black sides. Traffic 
was brisk, though we were far from any of the main arteries ; 
but nearly all transport in Holland is by water, and eve:y 
tiny township, however far inland, is a port with barges always 
lying at its quay. 
We skirted a long sandbank and stood out towards 
Zierikzee, a little fishing town that at that time had tem- 
porarily emerged from obscurity through being accidentall\- 
bombed by an English aviator." We did not stop there, but 
spent the next two days tacking through these inland waters 
on our way back to Dordrecht. How familiar grew that never- 
clianging line of shore, grey and jagged against the sky : 
Often it appeared almost transparent, shadowy and unreal as 
clouds. There is a dreaminess, a seJise, as in the East, of 
ancient things still undisturbed in these towns and villages. 
Barges sail in and out of the little harbours bringing all that 
is wanted from the outside world, and life goes on placidly, 
without competition or hurry. On the water the bargemen 
neither race each other nor exchange amenities after the 
custom of English watermen. They are a blase, weather- 
beaten race, dour and impassive. Their women folk, who 
take their turn at the wheel and assist in all the work of the 
ship, are brown and angular. It is a people apart, a tribe of 
law-abiding water gipsies. The painted cabins of the barges 
are reminiscent of the interior of a caravan. 
At nightfall we put into a neat but dingv state harbour, with 
a railway station and a quay from which a small steamboat 
made its four-mile journey to Willemstad. Beyond a great 
meadow, mterlaced with broad ditches, we could see amid a 
bank of poplars the roofs and chimneys of a large village. 
There was a final day beating down the HoUandsche Diep 
towards the Dorde Kil ; a day of basking in the sun almost 
wishmg that time might stop, leaving us for ever in the pleasant 
backwater where the peasants hardly realise a war is raging. 
The boat slipped steadily eastward, and presently the long 
Moordijk bridge, with its fourteen spans, loomed in sight. 
More distmct it grew, and at last our helm went down and 
we headed for the narrow waters of the Dordrecht canal. 
