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Updated: May 19, 2025
Follow the eastern group and they will take you to the Boche aircraft depôt at Lille. Thus were we reminded that tango teas and special constables belonged to the past. The covey landed at Saint Gregoire without mishap, except for a bent axle and a torn tyre. With these replaced, and the supplies of petrol and oil replenished, we flew south during the afternoon to the river-basin of war.
For the exceptional character of such conduct to be appreciated fully, it should be compared with that of Goethe, he who, as a student and as a sage, resembled nothing so much as a huge river-basin, which does not pour all its water into the sea, but spends as much of it on its way there, and at its various twists and turns, as it ultimately disgorges at its mouth.
The whole country was a catchment of patriotism a huge river-basin and these marching bands from the far-out country were the tributaries which fed the huge river of men which flowed from the State capitals to the concentration camps in Sydney and Melbourne.
Just before us, upon the very edge of a river-basin, was a low two-story building full of windows, and beyond, over the trees, were spires. They were the steeples of Waltham, and the many-windowed building was the factory of the American Watch Company. It stands upon a private road opened by the Company in a domain of about seventy acres belonging to them.
We reached the opposite shore, a mile below the starting-point, and began to ascend from the river-basin to the highlands by an excavated fissure in the famous “yellow earth.” This gives its name, not only to the river it discolors, but, from the extensive region comprised, even to the emperor himself, who takes the title of “Yellow Lord,” as equivalent to “Master of the World.” The thickness of this the richest soil in China, which according to Baron Richthofen is nothing more than so much dust accumulated during the course of ages by the winds from the northern deserts, is in some places at least two thousand feet.
There are umber-colored patches of fresh-turned furrows; here and there the mossy, luxurious verdure of new-springing rye; gray stubble; the ragged brown of discolored, frost-bitten rag-weed; next, a line of tree-tops, thickening as they drop to the near bed of a river, and beyond the river-basin showing again, with tufts of hemlock among naked oaks and maples; then roofs, cupolas; ambitious lookouts of suburban houses, spires, belfries, turrets: all these commingling in a long line of white, brown, and gray, which in sunny weather is backed by purple hills, and flanked one way by a shining streak of water, and the other by a stretch of low, wooded mountains that turn from purple to blue, and so blend with the northern sky.
Starting with the same river-basin as before, the geographic panorama now gains a new and deeper interest.
Boats could be conveyed over flat and easy portages from one river-basin to another, and these portages with a relatively small amount of labor were gradually changed into navigable channels, so that even now the canals are more important than many of the railways as arteries of commerce.
Thus, when human impatience rashly substitutes swiftly acting artificial contrivances for the slow methods by which nature drains the surface and superficial strata of a river-basin, the original equilibrium is disturbed, the waters of the heavens are no longer stored up in the earth to be gradually given out again, but are hurried out of man's domain with wasteful haste; and while the inundations of the river are sudden and disastrous, its current, when the drains have run dry, is reduced to a rivulet, it ceases to supply the power to drive the machinery for which it was once amply sufficient, and scarcely even waters the herds that pasture upon its margin.
Such a sign is generally respected by the inhabitants of other parts of the river-basin. They are aware also of the risk of infection that attends the handling of a corpse of one who has died of epidemic disease, and they attempt to minimise it by throwing a rope around it and dragging it to the graveyard, and there burying it in a shallow grave in the earth, without touching it with the hands.
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