We were with Consul van Hee one morning early before the clinging veil
of sleep had lifted from our spirits or the mists from the low-lying
meadows. Without warning our car shot through a bank of fog into a
spectacle of mediæval splendor--a veritable Field of the Cloth of Gold,
spread out on the green plains of Flanders.
A thousand horses strained at their bridles while their thousand
riders in great fur busbies loomed up almost like giants. A thousand
pennons stirred in the morning air while the sun burning through the
mists glinted on the tips of as many lances. The crack Belgian cavalry
divisions had been gathered here just behind the firing-lines in
readiness for a sortie; the Lancers in their cherry and green and the
Guides in their blue and gold making a blaze of color.
It was as if in a trance we had been carried back to a tourney of
ancient chivalry--this was before privations and the new drab uniforms
had taken all glamor out of the war. As we gazed upon the glittering
spectacle the order from the commander came to us:
"Back, back out of danger!"
"Forward!" was the charge to the Lancers.
The field-guns rumbled into line and each rider unslung his carbine.
Putting spurs to the horses, the whole line rode past saluting our
Stars and Stripes with a "_Vive L'Amerique_." Bringing up the rear two
cassocked priests served to give this pageantry a touch of prophetic
grimness.
And yet as the cavalcade swept across the fields thrilling us with its
color and its action, the nearby peasants went on spreading fertilizer
quite as calm and unconcerned as we were exhilarated.
"Stupid," "Clods," "Souls of oxen," we commented, yet a protagonist of
the peasant might point out that it was perhaps as noble and certainly
quite as useful to be held by a passion for the soil as to be caught by
the glamor of men riding out to slaughter. And Zola puts this in the
mind of his peasants.
"Why should I lose a day? Soldiers must fight, but folks must live. It
is for me to keep the corn growing."
Deep down into the soil the peasant strikes his roots. Urban people can
never comprehend when these roots are cut away how hopelessly lost and
adrift this European peasant in particular becomes. Wicked as the Great
War has seemed to us in its bearing down upon these innocent folks, yet
we can never understand the cruelty that they have suffered in being
uprooted from the land and sent forth to become beggars and wanderers
upon the highroads of the world.