ENGLAND'S JUNE.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 12085, 14 August 1917, Page 8

ENGLAND'S JUNE.

PICTURES OF PEACE AND BEAUTY. " SEVENTY MILES BEYOND. IS' HELL." (By ROBERT BLATV3HFORD. on the M Clarion.") ' I live Somewhere in Sussex. When I look out of my study window, between the rod-flowered chestnut and the golden green of the oak tree, I see an expanse of flowered fields, of green velvet woods, of soft uplands, and beyond them the Surrey hills, purple against the turquoise sky. It is a perfect June day. There is not a cloud; the blue has the sparkling, silky texture seen only on 'the fairest days in summer. There is not a sound except the singing of the birds and the humming oi the bees around a great mass of lilac-col-oured rhododendrons. Our next-door neighbours live in an Elizabethan cottage, about a hundred yards away. There are two more cottages four hundred yards further, and as much beyond those are the first houses of the village. If one walks out into the country here one sees no signs but good signs: signs of peace and prosperity. The well farmed fields, ploughed for wheat or ruled with dark blue-green Hues of potatoes, or glorious with the flowery hay grass, or gleaming with golden mustard. There is nowhere, in tho cosy homesteads, the black and white timbered farmhouses, th e quiet villages, the shady lanes, or the fields where the big horses tramp with the plough, any suggestion or any souvenir of war. Thirty miles southward is the sea. I saw it a great band of sapphire fading into a violet mist. Nowhere a> warship or patrol boat in sight. No hint of a mine or a submarine amongst the jewelled sparkles of the placid waves. Along the beaches the bungalows were dotted, with here and there a gay flag shining against tho pearly clouds. In a meadow some boys wero playing cricket. On the edge of the sands were children paddling; women walking in summer dresses, with sunshades like the tulips in our sleepy gardenSeventy miles beyond that h hell. And, as I hinted just now, one cannot look at the peaceful beauty of these English homes and meadows without thinking of that hell. Also one must not ask questions, or the shadow of the war blight will fall upon one like a cold hand. There is the gardener, calmly potting tomatoes over there in the cool shadow of an old barti. He lias five brothers in tho war. Tho hoy who brings our papers in the morning is the son of a soldier fighting the Bulgarians. The silent, dark-eyed man guiding the plough is expecting to be called up; he has a wife and three little children : one of them a round-faced wondering maid of about five years, named Mary Constance. Mary Constance recks not of the hell that roars and ravens a hundred miles away; though perchance she is cognisant of the scarcity of sugar. But I never see Mary Constance without thinking of the Huns and Belgium and France and the sapphire riband of sea that is 'the shield and armour of this dear and sweet okl island. All the country here in dear old England is as beautiful and sweet as an old sweet song. If you want to know what dear old England .is like in this perfect June you may use the wordy of the Psalmist: " Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace." You can think of the cow-bell in the pasture and cawing of Hie rooks in the elms. You can imagine the clouds of pearl and silver and tho skies of glistening blue. You can forget the stench of the cordite and call up the ghost of •the perfume of the sweetbriar and the hawthorn and the buttery gorse. You may think of the sunshine on tho meadows and tho blue tree shadows on the roads. You may look at England through the eyes of any poet or painter whose work you know, and bo sure thaishe is more fair than any brush or pen could paint her. And you may take it from me that in the midst of all the perfume, and the colour and the light and the sweet tranquility our hearts are with you boys in the bloodstained, horror-shaken mins of unhappy France.