June Days at Osteed.
THE YPRES TIMES
87
ABSENCE OF ENGLISH VISITORS ON THE DIGUE.
(1Specially contributed, to the Ypres Times.")
By An Observant Member of the League.
OBVIOUSLY there is no money in your family, or you are on a very early
holiday, if you are to be found staying at Ostend in June. The season
has not commenced, all the white palaces on the Digue are closed and the
Kursaal is but a mocking tomb.
We half-dozen English, who have taken advantage of the facilities afforded
by the Ypres League for week-end trips to Ostend, do not matter much to the town.
If we like to come, well, there is only the sand and the sea and the June sun for
us. A few "high-life cafés, perhaps, but nothing else, absolutely nothing.
The cafés, true, are abodes of melancholy, but out on the Digue it is all
summer gold and silver. The mail boats that pass the éscatade carry not holiday-
makers, but ambassadors of commerce, who are too busy calculating rates of
exchange to notice that Ostend is a very beautiful fishing village.
Ostend Just Itself.
Ostend, in fact, is just now enjoying the luxury of being itself, and we are
all prettier when we are just ourselves. The half and quarter millionaires will
come in August, but in June the townsfolk are out to enjoy their own.
It may be a trick of fancy, but Ostend, which emigrated to England in 1914,
seems thoroughly English this summer afternoon. It is a school half-holiday,
and the Flemish shouts and cries that come up from the sands have a very English
ring. Sturdy Flemish mothers, sitting about with their sturdy babies, have so
British a look that a man, sitting with his back to those white palaces and the.
vast Galerie du Roi," might almost think himself at Yarmouth. The sun
scorches as it scorches at Yarmouth; legs and arms are of the best nut-brown
Yarmouth polish; a few stout men in white hats sleep the sleep of Yarmouth,
and the solitary boatman, guarding the bathing-enclosure, who plies his oars
inshore, pulls the haven't-had-a-pint-all-day-sir pull of East Anglia.
But in this burning sunshine Ostend sands gleam whiter than any English
strand. Each grain is a mirror, and the glare is almost too much for the strongest
eyes.
Quite Un-English.
Twenty yards away a Flemish mother, sitting beside her babe, reminds me
that other things are not altogether English either. She has been paddling, and
now, seated with her face to the Digue, she amuses herself by powdering her legs
with sand. Gaby Deslys never did the thing with such calm insouciance and it is
all in proper form, the final brushing being done with a pad that, at the distance,
looks quite fashionable.
She sees that I am interested, but is she so foolish as to pretend that woman
is not bifurcated No, it is nice to have white legs, and you must admit, M. Anglais,
that they are very creditable affairs.