THE OLD ESTAMINET.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume III, Issue 858, 9 November 1916, Page 3

THE OLD ESTAMINET.

SOME FLEMISH JOURNEYS. GETTING THE PASSPORTS. The building is a long, low structure, with projecting eaves and a 1 wealth of honeysuckle playing prodigality about the door. It is a white j washed building, and stands a few! feet back from the cobbles of the! chaussce which leads to the chaos of war. Jt is a Flemish building, which in days of peace was none other than an eslaminet, or, in comprehensible English, a public-house, writes Margaret Bell, in the "Daily Chronicle." j That function still clings lo it, but it has another, the function introduced by war, which is carried on in the small dingy room just back of the first or entrance room, whose walls arc lined with pewter mugs, bright and shining as the young girl's face! before them. In that dingy back room sit two men wearing the blue uniform of the' Belgian Gendarme. All day long' they wi'ite and question, and answer: others' questions. This is the ollice of the Surete de Police, which, like! so many French phrases, is not translatable into English. It is here thai! everyone must come be he desirous: of journeying more than a kilometre' beyond his domain. Here he is

questioned as to his goings and the reason for them. And when the two! men wearing the gendarme's blue are satisfied that his reason is sufficiently j reasonable, they give him a sheet of] paper stamped and dated and signed,' which says thai he may journey to and from the place desired. Here, in the course of a day, come many would-be travellers. Civilians,! most of them, who live in the cottages and shacks which fringe thej Surete. They pause a moment or two on entering the door, and, with] no show of self-consciousness what-j ever, drop their great wooden sabots on the mat, then walk into the dingy j room unshod. And unstockinged, l 100, many of them. For many of the: cottages which now know them are not their own, and the I.ares and' Penates are of another's tiny household. They were hurried to the: cottages during the mad evacuation i through the fields by moonlight, I when everyone was obliged to ilee, j (error-stricken, from scenes they held most deal - . One old woman,' brought her flail, which still does' duly on the clay floor of an outhouse, when the scarcely tilled earth yields beans or corn enough for her I to thresh that way. A Twelve-mile Walk. She was not a JVequent visitor at I

jlhe dingy room back of the estamiI net, until quite recently. She came j in, hesitatingly, clutching a card 'which bore the stamp of a British JArmy Post Office. On Hie other side j in French were written blessed . words. She could not read them i herself, but she had found a neighbour who could. They told her that Victor, her youngest son, was in a field hospital, some 12 kilometres i away, with a wound in his leg. She I had not heard from him for a long i time, and almost feared the worst. j That's why the card w»s a blessed thing, even if it did tell of suffering. The gendarme was surprised that such an old woman should wish to walk so far. For there was no way for her to reach the hospital unless she walked. She answered all his questions in a scarcely audible tremor. "Born at Neuve-Eglise, 181.'!." Was it possible she wished to walk so far? She obtained her precious slip of paper, gathered her shawl about her, put on her heavy sabots, and started out joyfully to trudge VI weary kilometres to her son. Some two or three miles from this Surete, is a depot where the most destitute :>f the refugees receive food and clothing. There are many of them who apply each day for permis-

-jsion to go and fetch these neces- ? saries. There are mothers, old and I j young, many with babes in their i j arms, and numerous others clinging Mo their skirls. One mother, with II four such tiny charges, was a weeki|ly visitor at the Surete for months. -She was always pale ami tired-look-; t ': ing, as if she pined for something she' < could never have. It may have been > | for the husband, who never would j 'iconic back to her, even after all their j {land was i'we. Her cottage was a . | liny one, of one room only, set back Ijin a twisted little alley-way behind | the Place. I'.ach time she visited the ['Surete for a pass, she walked across (the Place. One morning, when the •sun was glinting the roofs of all the; i; cottages and smiling jovially on the , canal, with its rows of silent barges. - she walked across for the hist time.: 'Some intuitive Fortune had made her ; leave the children in the cottage. I can imagine their tearful vigil '.through the hours, when she did not. , | return. The sordid bed. the solitary j ii chair, the empty tins which held the -depot food, the hysteria of fear. . . . It was a shell which whistled j J across the sun-kissed canal, over the I roofs where the sun danced, and fell ; iu the middle of the Grande Place. Some of the Travellers. •I There is a little colony of nuns i

[ • 'living near the Surcte. Their owi I; convent, near Bruges, is now over 'trodden by the heel of the enemy !I Their present abode is a barn. Hn they have made it very comfortable | that is, until the winter winds gi I whistling across the Flemish plains | The nuns very often visit the ding: jhack room beyond the estami net—a new sight surely for scqucs jtercd eyes!—lor, although it does no I seem necessary for nuns to {rave will) a '"permis." there are no excep lions made in war time. Sister Anna makes it her duly tf look after the wants of the refugee children round about, ami see thai | they are supplied from the depot some few miles distant. She arrived j one day, with t\v<> wretched specimens, absolutely clothed in rags ■ with no shoes or stockings on then feet, and [heir bodies covered with sores. Siie had found them in an outhouse, sleeping next to pigs! ■ Katrine, who is $2, conies regularly for a pass, to go for food. She carries 18 wounds from bombs, ami her hands, which once earned extra : pennies from neat needlework, are now shrunken and distorted. She is .usually bright, but when she looks at her hands, her smile fades. During jone of her visits to the Surete a shell ■ visited her cottage, so that when she

! n arrived at it in the evening she saw r- a heap of broken bricks, y. Father Barbier comes, too, in his it long soutane, which is a most ine. appropriate robe to wear when lo traversing ploughed fields. That is s. I where his "permis." takes him. To ;\ the home of Augusta, with her 10i- days-old babe. It was he who ■;- ushered it into the world, even as >t he cheers lives leaving it. *1 One day, not long ago, a motor )- paused before the door, and the I chauffeur asked for water to cool his o engine. In the car were two women e and numerous packages of chocolate it This was to he distributed amongst t, children leaving for other lands, d It could tell tales, the dingy little i- room behind the estaminet —tales of s, hope and despair—and of waiting for r the dawning of a new era. !i