FRENCH IN FLANDERS.

AN IMPORTANT SECTOR.

FROM G. H PERRIS. WITH THE FRENCH ARMIES, DECEMBER. The three Western Allies are all represented on Belgian soil – King Albert’s army along the greater part of the Yser, the British on their right toward and past Ypres, the French on their left, across the coast road to Dunkirk and Calais. This last is a very small, but important, sector, consisting practically of the defences of Nieuport and the neighbouring coast. To pass directly from the snowcovered hills and forests of Lorraine to the dunes of Flanders, dim and raw under a North Sea mist, is to realise sharply the strange diversity of conditions to which the machinery of this war has had to be adapted. Two years had passed since I last saw the line of the Yser. Much has been done to make the lot of the armies more tolerable. Supplies and communications have been created. Flanders mud is incurable, for you cannot raise the level of the country, or change its soil; but the main roads are greatly improved, extended railways have relieved much of the pressure, and most troops have comfortable winter quarters. A part of the French sector is fortunate in that it rests mainly on sand; and the defence works of this narrow region of the dunes effectively dispose of the old warning against building on such a foundation. At La Panne, Coxyde, and Oost-Dunkerke, the sploshing pools of black slime are left behind for the clean yellow hillocks of the shore – an infinitely grateful change. A solid road carries us to another modest plage. The shore is guarded with fields of barbed wire; many batteries, light and heavy, are dug into the sides of the sandhills. Nieuport was a larger place, the bathing station being connected by a long street with the town, some three miles inland, which was the railway road and market centre of the Yser region. Immediately beyond this the flooded area begins, where, save for a few observation posts set on tiny islands, the hostile armies are widely separated. The battered and gutted hotel, shops, and houses of NieuportBains constitute a real fortress that bucks the Ostend-Calais road. There are trenches nearly half a mile beyond, on the north of the Yser – ridges of the dunes bolstered with sandbags. But the town looks like what old-time military architects would have called a typical modern fortress, with the canalised river for moat. Of course, the system cannot be described, but there are passages over the river, galleries by the sea and inland, observatories, battery emplacements, and points of concentration.

TRENCH JOURNALS.

In one cell – between an ambulance and an officer’s quarters – I found the editorial office of a journalistic confrère. “L’Echo des Dunes” proudly announces itself as the “official journal of the sea front, and has been entirely edited and printed on the front.” It is an eight-page lithographed sheet about equally divided between sport and humour, with a separate cartoon representing one of our “tanks” devouring a German host. Some dozens of trench journals are now produced in the French armies, representing one of several considerable movements to develop their powers of self-entertainment. These efforts could and should be pushed much further. In the great base camps there are abundant means of companionable diversion, and some of general instruction. In the few large towns near the front there are usually several cinemas, very rarely anything to stir the mind of a serious lad. In the smaller camps and villages there is generally no help toward a rational enjoyment of the long winter evenings. The Belgian front contributes little to the daily bulletins; but its guardians, whether in blue or khaki, are showing the same resource, resolution, and energy as the men in more constantly advertised sectors. The long days of defensive waiting weigh heavy upon the strongest nerves. The piers of Nieuport stretch their black arms out into the grey sea mist; and our thoughts strain forward, hoping to catch some secret of the unknown future.