Motor-Flight Through France

I. Boulogne to Amiens

A MOTOR - FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE PART I I BOULOGNE TO AMIENS THE motor-car has restored the romance of travel. Freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through the area of ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself, it has given us back the wonder, the adventure and the novelty which enlivened the way of our posting grandparents . Above all these recovered pleasures must be ranked the delight of taking a town unawares , stealing on it by back ways and unchronicled paths, and surprising in it some intimate aspect of past time, some silhouette hidden for half a century or more by the ugly mask of [ 1 ] A MOTOR·FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE railway embankments and the iron bulk of a huge station. Then the villages that we missed and yearned for from the windows of the train -the unseen villages have been given back to us I-and nowhere could the importance of the recovery have been more delightfully exemplified than on a May afternoon in the Pas-de-Calais, as we climbed the long ascent beyond Boulogne on the road to Arras. It is a delightful country, broken into wide waves of hill and valley, with hedge-rows high and leafy enough to bear comparison with the Kentish hedges among which our motor had left us a day or two before; and the villages, the frequent, smiling, happily-placed villages, will also meet successfully the more serious challenge of their English rivals-meet it on other grounds and in other ways, with paved marketplaces and clipped charmilles instead of gorsefringed commons, with soaring belfries instead of square church towers, with less of verdure, but more, perhaps, of outline-certainly of line. The country itself-so green, so full and close in texture, so pleasantly diversified by clumps of woodland in the hollows, and by [2] ARRAS: HOTEL DE VILLE BOULOGNE TO AMIENS streams threading the great fields with lightall this, too, has the English, or perhaps the Flemish quality-for the border is close bywith the added beauty of reach and amplitude, the deliberate gradual flow of level spaces into distant slopes, till the land breaks in a long blue crest against the seaward horizon. There was much beauty of detail, also, in the smaller towns through which we passed: some of them high-perched on ridges that raked the open country, with old houses stumbling down at picturesque angles from the central market-place; others tucked in the hollows, among orchards and barns, with the pleasant country industries reaching almost to the doors of their churches. In the little villages a deep delicious thatch overhangs the plastered walls of cottages espaliered with pear-trees, and ducks splash in ponds fringed with hawthorn and laburnum; and in the towns there is almost always some note of character, of distinctionthe gateway of a seventeenth century hOtel, the triple arch of a church-front, the spring of an old mossy apse, the stucco and black cross-beams of an ancient guild-house-and always the straight [3] A MOTOR-FLIGHT THROUGH FRANCE lime-walk, square-clipped or trained en berceau, with its sharp green angles and sharp black shade acquiring a value positively architectural against the high lights of the paved or gravelled place. Everything about this rich juicy land bathed in blond light is characteristically Flemish , even to the slow-moving eyes of the peasants, the bursting red cheeks of the children, the drowsy grouping of the cattle in Hat pastures; and at Hesdin we felt the architectural nearness of the Low Countries in the presence of a fine town-hall of the late Renaissance, with the peculiar "movement" of volutes and sculptured ornament-lime-stone against warm brick-that one associates with the civic architecture of Belgium: a fuller, less sensitive line than the French architect permits himself, with more massiveness and exuberance of detail. This part of France, with its wide expanse of agricultural landscape, disciplined and cultivated to the last point of finish, shows how nature may be utilized to the utmost clod without losing its freshness and naturalness. In some regions of this supremely" administered" country, where space is more restricted, or the fortunate acci- [4] BOULOGNE TO AMIENS dents of water and...