August 8, 191 8 
Land & Water 
2 1 
St. Ouentin : By Brett Young 
IT is doubtful if St. Quentin ever meant very much 
to Sergeant Bemerton. It was a change .... 
Any sort of change came as a relief after the pitheads 
and slag heaps of the Lens sector. A black-country 
regiment might have felt themselves at home there; 
but the Mid-Wessex, their eyes accustomed to the green 
of water meadows or the pale and beautiful contours of 
ch'alk downs, hated their blackness and their squalor. St. 
Quentin was a good deal better. That was the best that 
they could say for it. 
Chimneys, of course .... From the rising ground on 
either side of the sunken Roman road that cut the map in 
half, running right back to Holnon, you looked over 
Dromedary Valley to the chimney stacks of the Faubourg 
St. Martin. A little to the left shone the white stones of 
the cemetery, just to remind one that in a less romantic age 
people had actually died in their beds and been buried away 
from the sound of high explosive. But there were better 
things to be seen from the Bacon and Burma trenches 
(such were their fantastic labels) than chimneys and a 
cemetery. Beyond them lay the bulk of the city of St. 
Quentin, so miraculously unscathed. Bemerton often 
wondered, and many of the Mid-We.ssex must have 
wondered with him, what sort of life the people under 
those clustered roofs were living. The very silence of that 
habitable, unattainable city, with its hundreds of windows 
staring out over the two lines of trenches, was impressive. 
In it there was so little sign of life. A dead city. One 
that had been swept by a plague (as, alas ! it had) : a dream 
city that had no business to be there planked down 
ridiculously with all its comforts and beauties unimpaired 
in the middle of the German lines. It was difficult to believe 
that men, women and children inhabited it. The Boche 
was there. There was no doubt about that anyway, for 
Bemerton himself, looking through a pair of field gla.sses, 
had Seen them change the guard on thfe cathedral steps 
It struck him as ludicrous that they should stick a sentry 
there. Nobody except the Boche wanted to hurt any 
cathedral .... But it would have been damned good 
fun to pot that sentry. 
So the novelt\ wore off. The Mid-Wessex began to take 
St. Quentin as a matter of course. Even the speculations 
as to the life of the ghostly city which had stirred vaguely 
in Sergeant Bemerton 's mind became faint and fainter. 
They never wholly disappeared. From the section of Bacon 
trench on the left of the Roman road that his platoon were 
holding, he would sometimes become aware of that promi- 
nent ape's: of the cathedral with its two pinnacles (one 
broken) piercing the calmness of his thoughts in a peculiar 
way. There was no accounting for it. It seemed to be 
linking up somehow with another part of himself. He didn't 
analyse it ... . You can't analyse that sort of thing 
even if ,you want to ; and Bemerton didn't want to. He 
only knew that the thing was rather queer. Afterwards, 
indeed, he tried to explain it, and this was the nearest he 
got to it. "You know," he said, "sometimes, in the middle 
of talking to another chap you suddenly hear yourself 
speaking and him answering you back, and you think 
' Hullo . . . this has all happened before.' Well, it was 
like that. That sort of feeling." 
You see what he meant. . . . You realise how fright- 
fully difficult "that sort of thing" is to express^; and it's 
probable he wouldn't ever have noticed it — even In view of 
what happened afterwards — if it hadn't been for the fact 
thgt St. Quentin, and particularly that peaked profile of 
the cathedral, were continually probing this queer, dark eddy 
in his consciousness and suggesting . . . again it's difficult 
. . . tTiat time wasn't after all the stable definite thing that 
he took for granted : that the present was liable to be 
jumbled up with the future or the past. The future, no 
doubt. He wasn't superstitious, but he felt sure that 
something would probably happen to him in St. Quentin, 
and that the cathedral was mixed up with it. Sufficient 
unto the day was the evil thereof. 
And the winter days wei^e very evil. The city, at any 
rate, was a damned 1 sight more comfortable than Bacon 
trench ; even more comfortable, he imagined, than the hut 
billets behind the wood at Marteville. There were beds in 
St. Quentin. Fritz had all the luck. "Don't 'ee believe 
it," said Billy Chamberlayne, another lad from the .Adder 
valley, "I know they French beds. . . . And if us got 
into St. Quentin there'd be a lot of old street fighting. A 
"■Something hit his left foot" 
By Christopher Cl.irk 
:>pfii,tii y (Ifctiritjor 
• LtiiiJ iy II alei' 
