As we finished our conversation with the group of women I looked in at
the window with the innocent idea of seeing what the furnishings of a
Flemish farmhouse were like. There, to my amazement, I saw two prim and
perfectly well-behaved Tommies sitting at a table and just beginning to
have tea, or, rather, coffee. It was the modern version of those
seventeenth century Flemish pictures which one sees in most Museums,
where a brutal and licentious soldiery are in possession of some
wretched Belgian yeoman's house. The Tommies were, of course, going to
pay liberally for their coffee and were evidently behaving with the pink
of propriety.
From the farm we walked down the road half-way into "Dickybush" and
then, turning to the right, took a field-path up a little hill to get
one last view of Ypres under its canopy of mist and smoke, pierced by
the towers of the Cloth Hall and the Cathedral. The little field-path
was of the kind which one sees everywhere on the Continent, a path
somehow quite different from the English field-path. At the end of it
stood a typical Belgian peasant, for we were over the border. I asked
him a question, but he shook his head, for he could only talk Flemish,
and muttered something about "les Allemands," making the usual sign for
throat cutting.
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