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Updated: May 15, 2025
For a long time these cottages were the only houses at La Panne, which was seldom visited, except by a few artists; but about fifteen years ago the surveyors and the architects made their appearance, paths and roads were laid out, and, as if by magic, cottages and villas and the inevitable digue de mer have sprung up on the dunes near the sea, and not very far from the original village.
The building of these massive sea-walls is a work of great labour and expense, for what seems to be an impregnable embankment, perhaps 30 feet high and 90 feet broad, solid and strong enough to resist the most violent breakers, will be undermined and fall to pieces in a few hours, if not made in the proper way. A digue, no matter how thick, which rests on the sand alone will not last.
Sheik Jabias thus sums up his impressions after visiting the Cid in his camp: Vous dominiez tout, grand, sans chef, sans joug, sans digue, Absolu, lance au poing, panache, au front.... And that Cid had never fought up in the air. To quote him once more, Sheik Jabias, after being dazzled by the Cid in his camp, is supposed to see him in his father's castle at Bivar, doing more humble work.
A few of the malgamite workers were seen at times, when they could get leave, on the Digue, or outside the smaller cafes. Inoffensive, stricken men these appeared to be, and the big-limbed, hardy fishermen looked on them with mingled contempt and pity. No one knew what the works were, and no one cared.
All day long in summer the digue of each town is crowded by people walking about in the sunshine, or sitting watching the bathers and the children playing on the sands. It is a very gay sight.
The old village, a nondescript collection of houses, lies on the Vicinal railway about a mile from the sea, which is reached by a straight roadway, and where there is a digue, numerous hotels, pensions, and villas, all of which are filled to overflowing in the season.
This is strengthened by posts driven through it into the sand. Heavy timbers, resting on bundles of branches lashed together, are wedged into the foundations, and slope inwards and upwards to within a few feet of the height to which it is intended to carry the digue.
As soon as there was light next morning, the English weighed anchor and sailed along the coast to the east; past lonely yellow sands, which have swarmed during recent years with workmen toiling at the construction of the immense harbour of See-Brugge, which is to be the future port of Bruges; past what was then the small fishing hamlet of Heyst; past a range of barren dunes, amongst which to-day Duinbergen, the latest of the Flemish watering-places, with its spacious hotel and trim villas, is being laid out; past a waste of storm-swept sand and rushes, on which are now the digue of Knocke, a cluster of hotels and crowded lodging-houses, and a golf-course; and so onwards till they opened the mouth of the Zwijn, and saw the French ships crowding the entrance, 'their masts appearing to be like a great wood, and beyond them the walls of Sluis rising from the wet sands left by the receding tide.
Why is it that we English can't get on the King's Road at Brighton anything faintly approaching that splendid sea front on the Digue at Ostend, or those coquettish white villas that line the Promenade des Anglais at Nice? The blight of London seems to lie over all Southern England. Paris looks like the capital of a world-wide empire.
"The préfet of the Var department, M. le Comte de Bouthillier, sent an express courier on Thursday last to the préfet of the Basses-Alpes, who sent that courier straight on to me, telling me that he and General Loverdo, who is in command of the troops in that district, promptly evacuated Digue because they were not certain of the loyalty of the garrison.
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