Item 06: Frank H. Molony diary, 25 March 1918-7 August 1918 - Page 161
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[Page 161]
June 15, 16
210.
The 5th have had another "Minor operation" today: at 5 tonight a raid on an out-post and eleven prisoners taken.
Posted away this morning "Raptures" and "Reincarnation".
211.
"How can we find?" how can we rest? how can
We, being Gods, win joy, or peace being man?
We the gaunt zanies of a witless fate
Who love the unloving, and the lover hate,
Forget, the moment ere the moment slips,
Kiss with blind lips that seek beyond the lips
Who want, and know not what we want, and cry,
With crooked mouths for Heaven, and throw it by.
So Brooke fills the accounting of a mood.
June 16
212.
A pass to St. Omer: so away early. Down through the fields, full of a splendid sun in a ballade blue and heaped cloud sky, walking was perfect and an elation held me all the way till I struck the main road below Cassel, it was only a short while walking, but each step hardened the thighs for a long marching.
June 16
By Bavinchove rain filled clouds were low, and for a while it rained heavily, then passed to Cassell, and the sun was a hundred times more beautiful after. Out of a lumbering lorry at Arques, and walking again. Then St. Omer strung across the fields, and church towers clearly grey solidly standing from massed roofs red and grey and purple, full and a tremendous sky of white and gleaming blue. It was more exciting than the first seeing of Amiens. Now Amiens is a dead city.
Then a short two hundreds yards of high poplar flanked road, and the outer edge of the city. Streets like Bailleul's and occasionally narrow, high, steep-roofed old buildings.
In the cathedral – a walking around about it, and then in through the southern doorways, through the deep high porch, with the strange Judgment carvings above the doorways.