LA PANNE
From Calais to La Panne is fifty miles. Calais
is under military law. It is difficult to enter,
almost impossible to leave in the direction in which
I wished to go. But here again the Belgian Red
Cross achieved the impossible. I was taken before
the authorities, sharply questioned, and in the end
a pink slip was passed over to the official of the
Red Cross who was to take me to the front. I wish
I could have secured that pink slip, if only because
of its apparent fragility and its astounding wearing
qualities. All told, between Calais and La Panne
it was inspected—texture, weight and reading
matter, front and reverse sides, upside down and under
glass—by some several hundred sentries,
officials and petty highwaymen. It suffered everything
but attack by bayonet. I found myself repeating
that way to madness of Mark Twain’s:
Punch, brothers, punch with care,
Punch in the presence of the passenjaire,
A pink trip slip for a five-cent fare—
and so on.
Northeast then, in an open grey car with “Belgian
Red Cross” on each side of the machine.
Northeast in a bitter wind, into a desolate and almost
empty country of flat fields, canals and roads bordered
by endless rows of trees bent forward like marching
men. Northeast through Gravelines, once celebrated
of the Armada and now a manufacturing city. It
is curious to think that a part of the Armada went
ashore at Gravelines, and that, by the shifting of
the English Channel, it is now two miles inland and
connected with the sea by a ship canal. Northeast
still, to Dunkirk.
From Calais to Gravelines there had been few signs
of war—an occasional grey lorry laden with
supplies for the front; great ambulances, also grey,
and with a red cross on the top as a warning to aeroplanes;
now and then an armoured car. At Gravelines the
country took on a more forbidding appearance.
Trenches flanked the roads, which were partly closed
here and there by overlapping earthworks, so that
the car must turn sharply to the left and then to the
right to get through. At night the passage is
closed by barbed wire. In one place a bridge
was closed by a steel rope, which a sentry lowered
after another operation on the pink slip.
The landscape grew more desolate as the daylight began
to fade, more desolate and more warlike. There
were platforms for lookouts here and there in the
trees, prepared during the early days of the war before
the German advance was checked. And there were
barbed-wire entanglements in the fields. I had
always thought of a barbed-wire entanglement as probably
breast high. It was surprising to see them only
from eighteen inches to two feet in height. It
was odd, too, to think that most of the barbed wire
had been made in America. Barbed wire is playing
a tremendous part in this war. The English say
that the Boers originated this use for it in the South
African War. Certainly much tragedy and an occasional
bit of grim humour attach to its present use.
