October ii, 1917 
LAND & WATER 
17 
Autumn Days in Flanders 
By an Officer 
T/ii's vivid description of Fhuiders during the gloriuioi 
weather which Western Europe enjoyed this autumn under 
the waxing harvest moon was written by an officer on active 
service before the weather broke and ilie present cold and 
rainy spell began. It forms an excellent commentary on 
Captain Handley-Reid's drawings of the British Firing 
Line, two of which are reproduced on page 20 of this issue. 
Autumn has come to Flanders and it has come 
/% with a kindliness, a well-disposed friendliness, 
/ % not less agreeable to the Army than to those who 
jL jLdirect our battles, ^t came in the nifjht with a 
nip in the air, with a quick keenness and freshness in the 
small hours, with a sudden brightening of the stars which 
caused dwellers in tents to arise from their l^eds and to lay 
an extra coat over the sleeping-bags. Next day tliCTe was a 
clear blue atmosphere, a cool breeze morning and evening, 
mid-days an almost perfect stillness. The swallows had 
gone. Thev disappeared in the first days of September, 
jiot gregariously, a little mysteriously, without a noticeable 
grouping along roof-tops or on telegraph wires. They were 
just gone — gone from the land of dykes and ditches and an 
atmosphere curiously disturbed, gone to a world of perpetual 
sunshine, of exotic things, of azure skies. 
There comes to Flanders about this time a certain golden 
dreaminess of atmosphere which is the nearest to beauty 
tliat the flat countries ever know. Fen-dwellers, those who 
li\e on flats and broads or lieside far-stretching meres, will 
know this-~dwellers in the eastern English counties. No 
magnificence of flaming woods or of mountainous purple 
heath or of gorse-strewn commons, or of panoramic contrast. 
No bounteous spread of a late harvest or richness of the 
rolling plains. Tnsttad, there comes a film of deepest blue 
and.mistv gold, a certain rich, lingering, yet fading quality 
of sunlight that blots out misery and iiorror, that discovers 
Ix-auty in squalor and desolation, that conveys the fancy of 
some ultimate land wherein humanity shall rest at hist. 
And liecause the tracks and tlie roads are at their driest, 
and because discomforts are least, and because the worst 
iiorrors of the vear are probably over, the soldiers, too,' like 
this 'time the best^ ' Tnie, never far away, is the Ix'ckoning 
■ spectre of winter— he of the grim, grey, and mud-brown 
habit, whose \ isage is desolation, whose heart is colder than 
>tone. But the private soldier, never a man who looks 
too far ahead, lives in and for the present which is his safe- 
guard and '^al\-ation ; for the man who allowed himself to 
ilread would jx-rish early ; and if lie lingers, poor fellow, in 
the, sell-deception that " the war will be over. l)efore Christ- 
mas," that "the Germans won't face another winter"-- 
it is testimony to his magnificent incurable optimism, it is 
part of his curious simplicity and pathos. 
Looking out of a windo-.v, one glimpses a scene that would 
.gladden the hearts of those to whom war is a tragedy un- 
reliexed, whose nearest and dearest out here are as the lost 
and the damned for ever wrestling in a kind of Purgatory. 
The October sunshine streams in through open windows, 
lighting up cheerfully this farmhouse room which might 
otherwise look a little dingy-. A fading flowery wallpaper, a 
chest of drawers of duH polishe<l mahogany, a great dark 
clothes cupboard, three beds with sjwtless sheets showing, 
two of them tented fwith the quei^r white cribs to be 
found in all these farmhouses ; a figure of the Virgin in an 
iJaborate (and hideous) white cardboard shrine beneath a 
glass case ; one or two faded oleograpiis of sacred subjects 
on the walls ; low beams supjx>rting a very low ceiling -- 
this is the interior. It is exceptionally comfortable, ex- 
ceptionally clean, but in other resp«'cts precisely representative 
of .every other French or Belgian farmhouse. 
Outside is the courtyard with farm buildings on three 
sides., Ducks and poultry make the place lively with their 
cjuacking and cackling ; from the byre comes the lowing of 
cows, comes also the farmer wlio has been milking a sour- 
looking man. but pc^lite withal, and good-humoured like 
most of his race. The wife is there too, a rough kindly 
fenjale, whose hands are never idle. They live hard, these 
people, to judge by appearances. Of » military aspect there 
is notiiing but th< >riuiy tramping up and down his post. 
The billet-guard lounge outside the farm, which is their 
guard-room. A man, clad only in shirt and trousers, lies at 
full length dozing in the pleasant sunshine ; another is asleep, 
in the same garb and attitude, and I think I have never seen 
such an expression ot perfect content as rests upon his face ; 
others are pla\ing football in the meadow opposite, their 
siiouts and laughter float in on the sunbeams like those that 
came from playgrounds of a half-forgotten boyhood. Be- 
yond is a wide, flat vista of little fields poplar-lined, of hedge- 
rows studded with curiously-pollarded oak-trees, of small 
marshy streams whose outline is discovered by a line of 
crooked willows, of thatched and brilliant red-roofed farm- 
houses peering from iX)pIar-gro\es, and here and there an 
orchard and here and there a church spire. It is a monotonous 
landscape, but a restful after the world of shell-holes and 
desolation. > ' 
Here is no war. Aeroplanes go droning overhead On their 
missions to and from the line. 'U e have field days — a sort of 
Olympic game. Bv. night you may see the anti-aircraft 
shrapnel bursting "far away to the eastward. The other 
evening, many miles distant", a captive balloon could be seen 
slowly falling" in flames like a sheet of burning paper. By 
night, too, criss-crossed and interlaced, countle*;s searchlights 
throw white beams across a dim purple jewelled sky. 
But as you mo\e off the roads toward " the line," there 
comes a monotony far deejier, a wealth of activity far more 
same and unvarying than the landscape of Northern F"rance. 
That landscape "changes as soon as the frontier is crossed, 
the little grassy fields give place to a semi-suburban country, 
a succession of plots and lots, of cabbages, vetches, potatoes, 
liops, loots, clover, and close cultivation. The villages and 
towns are not beautiful — no rest for the eye anywhere. And 
from the paved tree-bordered main roads comes the turgid 
grinding brawl of the motor trafiic, a worrying medley of 
sounds which has not ceased since August, 1914, which will 
not cease until the great armies fade >at last into the grey 
Flanders mist. 
Day and night, night and day, winter, spring, summer, 
and autumn, it goes on, this hoot and hurry of the traflic to 
remind lonely Londoners of well-remembered lighted streets 
in the cheerful early dusk. 
And as you move onward with the tide of lorries, the 
waggons, and the long lines of moving traffic, you come to a 
yet deeper monotony, to a monotony yet more changeless, 
after the endless camps, the endless horse and mule-lines, 
the endless swarming troops and khaki, the empty husks 
of houses and skeleton villages, you come to the vast crater- 
field — to use an apt Oerman expression — the old brown 
battlefields. Thitherward we all go, and autumn brings no 
change, for no change is possible — it is perpetual winter 
there. But stay ! Is it winter when the bright October sun- 
shine rises over Houthulst, lighting splendidly the promised 
land beyond this grim, stern-named valley of Braen- 
beek, and tired outposts shake the dew front their clothing,' 
and German smoke rises from German fires beyond the 
stream, and night is past. 
Captain Persius, the well-known Naval writer in the Berliner 
Tageblatt, expressed this view of submarines towards the end of last 
niontfi : " In ?pite of all our enemies' boastful attempts to prove 
that the submarine menace is slight, and in .spite of the en(jr- 
mous anil increasuig .difticiilties which beset our submarine 
crews, the belief of the (German people remains unshaken and 
unshakable, and they know that in the end. when the requisite 
quantity of submarine material and men have gone into action, 
Great Britain's wi.sh to continue the w'a'i will be so paralysed 
that there will be a reasonably prospect of peace. The reports 
of our Admiralty Staff, which reach us almost daily, cause us to 
gaze with constant admiration on those heroic souls, who are 
fighting in home and foreign waters for the weal of the Father- 
land, .sometimes on. and sometinies under the water, but always 
looking death in the face. We also remember with gratitude those 
who are producing these complicated instruments. Only by 
the combination of personal and material forces of the most 
specialised kind can we attain ultimate success by means of these 
most modern weapons, whose destructive capacity, so far as war 
and merchant shipping are concerned, is astonishing the world, 
and opening a way to entirely new metliods in naval warfare." 
COCCLCS 
WMO-SCBCCNS 
.AWINOOW5 
<^L.^\ 
• THE ONUY X 
SAFETY CLASS 
