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[Page 23]
carelessly flung necklace of pearls; but he doubled at a great height and eventually got away. But he had to go for the lick of his life. It has been perfect to-day and I was wishing I had a big canvas and the certainty that the fine weather would continue. As it is I go round making all the notes I can - just collecting data. As old Remus says - "you can't make pictures out of nothing". Material is the thing. To-day one of our men and two Tommies came in, having escaped from the Hun lines. They are in very poor condition and are being fed up, poor chaps. For a start they ate three breakfasts.
St. Gratien, June 25th, '18.
I have been out all day at some military competitions. A number of men under Lt. D. a friend of mine, mounted a lorry and set off early this morning for a rifle range the other side of Amiens. I felt rather sick when we started but bowling along on a perfect day over the plateau braced me up. We went through Amiens, not so knocked about as one would think and pulled up for a minute or two in the Cathedral square. The splendour of the facade set me thinking of that part of Anatole France's book, in which he invokes the spirit of the Middle Ages, a spirit whose influence he declares still infuses modem France ... Though I have never wakened nor stirred it to action, this has been, since I first set foot in France, a dormant thought in me. It is shown in all their doings and it is a spirit that has never touched the Germans. I know too little about it. In order to be well informed on the subject one would need to be a decipher of documents written in characters and dialects long since vanished and to understand the customs of France from the Pyrenees to the Ardennes and parallel them down through the centuries, in their relation to France's illustrious history, from the times of the shadowy Merovingian Kings to these present days when, still as fiery, still as invincible, she drives the savages who pollute it from off her honoured soil. Behind all her doings celestially suspended, (like the shining visionary angels one may see in pions early-Burgundian pictures, charging, with resolute faith, some soldier saint) this