"Toujours Francs-Péronnais Auront bon jour, Toujours et en tout temps Francs-Péronnais auront bon temps,"
the girls used to sing in old days as they wove the wonderful linens and tissues of Péronne, or embroidered banners of gorgeous colours to commemorate the saving of the Picard city by Catherine: as Brian repeated to Father Beckett wandering through the ruins redeemed last spring for France by the British. And though Brian's eyes could not see the rubbish-heap where once had soared the citadel he saw through the mystic veil of his blindness many things which others did not see.
It seems that above these marshy flats of the Somme, where the river has wandered away from the hills and disguised itself in shining lakes, gauzy mists always hover. Brian had seen them with bodily eyes, while he was a soldier. Now, with the eyes of his spirit he saw them again, gleaming with the delicate, indescribable colours which only blind eyes can call up to lighten darkness. He saw the fleecy clouds streaming over Péronne like a vast, transparent ghost-banner. He saw on their filmy folds, as if traced in blue and gold and royal purple, the ever famous scene on the walls when Catherine and her following beat back Nassau's men from the one breach where they might have captured the town. And this mystic banner of the spirit Germans can never capture or desecrate. It will wave over Péronne--what was Péronne, and what will again be Péronne--while the world goes on making history for free men.
After Péronne, Bapaume: the battered corpse of Bapaume, murdered in flame that reddened all the skies of Picardy before the British came to chase the Germans out!
In old times, when a place was destroyed the saying was, "Not one stone is left upon another." But in this war, destruction means an avalanche of stones upon each other. Bapaume as Father Beckett saw it, is a Herculaneum unexcavated. Beneath lie buried countless precious things, and still more precious memories; the feudal grandeur of the old château where Philippe-Auguste married proud Isabelle de Hainaut, with splendid ceremony as long ago as 1180: the broken glory of ancient ramparts, where modern lovers walked till the bugles of August 2, 1914, parted them for ever; the arcaded Town Hall, old as the domination of the Spaniards in Picardy; the sixteenth-century church of St. Nicolas with its quaint Byzantine Virgin of miracles: the statue of Faidherbe who beat back the German wave from Bapaume in 1871: all, all burned and battered, and mingled inextricably with débris of pitiful little homes, nobles' houses, rich shops and tiny _boutiques_, so that, when Bapaume rises from the dead, she will rise as one--even as France has risen.