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 Peronne--what was Peronne, and what will again be
Peronne--while the world goes on making history for free men.
After Peronne, 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 chateau
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 debris 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.
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