The landscape is one of black dead trees hanging dead arms. Old blown-up trees lie, root and all, along the roadside. There are great numbers of sockets of old gas-shells relating to the taking of Locre by the Germans in April 1918, heaps also of rusty rifle grenades which seem to have been collected and put by the side of the road. Remarkable ever are the promiscuously piled mountains of domestic old iron which one passes. It would be an interesting exercise for a young detective to decide what each piece of wreckage had been before the war. Certain things you can be sure about however--oil-drums, coal-scuttles, wash-bowls, chamber conveniences, armchair and sofa springs, metal guts of mattresses, perforated bowls for straining greens, coffee-pots, mangling and washing machines, scales, canisters, salvers--a clean sweep for every farm-house and every village. And in the new houses there is scarcely one saved utensil carried forward. Among the new articles introduced one may remark china casts of Charlie Chaplin in gala attire. The frontier land is hilly. One skirts the upland of which Mount Kemmel on the left is the most prominent feature. It is three or four kilometres from the rope of the frontier to the French line of douane and its customs-gendarmes. One looks down to the first town in France, Bailleul, and it looks like a picture which someone has drawn and then crossed out with black lines and smudged. As one approaches, this is found to be the residential suburb or park called L'asile, with grandiose buildings, now an appalling wreck with not one redeeming new patch upon it. Heaps of debris stand higher than houses, and houses which have not fallen have as it were been pushed forward upon one another. The frontier gendarmes examine your passport and you are free in France. You see the first diminutive huts of the French returned refugees, and then in the mud of the street, urchins playing bat and ball with a slowly-expiring frog which they hold by one dangling leg, and toss to the boy with the bat. A few steps further and it is Bailleul. Bailleul too is a great wreck as remarkable as Ypres, and its progress of recuperation is much slower. It does not cater for war pilgrims or take the money of tourists, and so there are no prominent hotels and few estaminets. Most of its houses are down, its ways are choked with ruin, and in the evening nondescript squads of workmen shuffle through the streets to their homes in barracks and cellar. * * * * *