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Updated: June 13, 2025
Perhaps she is embittered; but there was no bitterness in her voice that afternoon in the little villa at La Panne only sadness and great sorrow and, with it, deep conviction. What Queen Elisabeth of Belgium says, she believes; and who should know better? There, to that house on the sea front, in the fragment of Belgium that remains, go all the hideous details that are war. She knows them all.
But at sunset we came on a big seaside colony stretched out above the longest beach I ever saw: along the sea-front, an esplanade bordered by the usual foolish villas, and behind it a single street filled with hotels and shops. All the life of the desert region we had traversed seemed to have taken refuge at La Panne.
"There will be a moon to-night," said my cicerone, "so before going to La Panne, where quarters have been reserved for you, I shall take you to Furnes. The Grande Place is pure Spanish it was built in the Duke of Alva's time, you know and it is very beautiful by moonlight."
When I said I saw another aspect of it, the kind, soothing suggestion was that I must be a little over-tired. 7 May. They say La Panne is to be bombarded to-day. The Queen has left. I was much touched when some people at home clubbed together and sent me out a little car a short time ago. But, alas! it had not been chosen with judgment, and is no use.
He never will be. Once at night he took me and the car into an iron railroad gate, and bent the gate into a V. I was bent into the whole alphabet. The car was a limousine. After that one cold ride from Calais to La Panne I was always in a limousine always, of course, where a car could go at all.
The contrast between Brussels and La Panne is the contrast between Belgium as it was and as it is. The last time I was in Belgium, before this war, I was in Brussels. The great modern city of three-quarters of a million people had grown up round the ancient capital of Brabant. Its name, which means "the dwelling on the marsh," dates from the tenth century.
Then, but feebly, you will have visualised the Ambulance Ocean at La Panne as I saw it that first winter of the war. The town is built on the sand dunes, and is not unlike Ostend in general situation; but it is hardly more than a village. Such trees as there are grow out of the sand, and are twisted by the winds from the sea. Their trunks are green with smooth moss.
At 5.30 I came back to La Panne to see Countess de Caraman Chimay, the dame d'honneur of the Queen of the Belgians; then I went on to dine with the nurses at the "Ocean." Here I heard that Adinkerke, which I had just left, was being shelled. Fortunately, the station being there, I hope the inhabitants got away; but it was unpleasant to hear the sound of guns so near.
A general exclamation of assent from the other officers, and a protest from the hero: "Me? Why, my ugly mug will smash the plate!" But it didn't Reluctantly we turned from this interval in the day's sad round, and took the road to La Panne. Dust, dunes, deserted villages: my memory keeps no more definite vision of the run.
I wonder why I wonder why I love pretty things so much, really pretty things, like crepe de chine and taffeta and panne velvet and satin. Oh, sometimes I think I must have them. When I go to Lancaster I want lots of lovely clothes and I hate ginghams and percales and serviceable things." "I know, Phœbe, I know how you feel about it." "Do you really? Then it can't be so awfully wicked.
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