1936 On the Continent

having been to Ostend. The baths here are also exceedingly comfortable, and there are a great many hotels and restaurants. Very fine concerts are frequently being given, and the Casino here has gaming rooms larger and finer than those of Ostend. The building itself is carried out on daring modern lines.
The Hotel Problem
    As to the hotels, you may choose the Rubens or any other to be found here. They are all excellent. (Let it be said, in passing, that the hotel problem is easily solved in Belgium.) All the towns we will describe are tourist centres, and the hotel trade is very up to date and satisfactory everywhere owing to the intensive competition. This is a guarantee of service and efficiency. It is advisable, on arriving at any hotel or boarding-house, to ask for all particulars as to the rooms, the comfort you may expect, the meals, and so on. You will find that these questions will be willingly answered. As for tips, this has been regulated in Belgium, and most hotels charge an additional service fee—roughly 10 per cent. of the bill—but it is usual to give something extra to the porter. In the cafés, tea-rooms, or where there is dancing, it is understood that waiters and waitresses should be tipped. The tips vary from ten to twenty per cent, of the bill, according to the generosity of the customer, his degree of satisfaction with the service, and the amount of the bill.
    When you are tired of bathing, tennis or golf at Le Zoute (there is plenty of opportunity for golf along theBelgian coast, at Le Zoute we have the biggest golf course in Europe—three 18-hole links); when you will have spent long days wandering among the dunes—wide sand-hills covered with wild grass; when you will have tried horse-riding, hockey, sand-skimming, and even flying (at Ostend there is a very big aerodrome, too), you will be able to go inland to visit the Flemish country lying flat and endless behind the dunes that roll on towards the interior of Belgium.
    The people you will meet in the small villages, which lie close together, are tillers of the soil. The soil is fertile, and the wheat fields are as golden in summer as the dunes that protect them. There are great pastures too, and many cattle grazing. Everywhere you will see farms, barnyards, stables, and simple, friendly peasant folk.
    The villages themselves, their houses always clustered around a church spire—these churches are often very old—have the rustic grace of things untouched by time. Here you will find old women, worn as the cobbles of the highways, smoking pipes. Flanders is an agricultural country producing the usual farm and market-garden products. The only great local industry is the weaving industry, which is very important and world famous. The flax fields cover a very large area. Farther on, on the way to Bruges, you will find the lace-makers, and beyond that, around Ghent, the countless flowers of the horticultural regions.
War and Battlefields
    “Before going to Bruges and Ghent, would you care to visit the battlefields?”
    “Do people talk much of war in your country?” asked Muriel.
    “Yes, unfortunately, and not always with wisdom. So many people begin their world history at 1914; their eyes and hearts are riveted to this historic date. But history moves on, and a very few enlightened people admit that you cannot remain for ever morally at war with your neighbours. The War has been over for more than twenty years. If a new war breaks out to-morrow, those who fight will have been for the most part bornafter the tumult. What grudge can these have against the other men, as young as they, who will be their ‘enemies’? For this reason, here as everywhere, I suppose intelligent persons (which, alas, does not mean the majority) think war can only be the outcome of bad management to be laid at the door of those who govern and are influenced by great industrial interests. These also think that the poorest peace is worth the most brilliant of wars, and that these criminal follies are the greatest scourge of modern times and the most convincing proof of man’s folly. It is a great pity that so often on the Continent you hear only words of contempt and hatred for other nations, and that so often it is easier to rouse the evil in men than their finer feelings. It is sad to have to admit that people will not realise that everyone must live and that there is surfeit of everything on the earth and sunshine for all—enough to allow each one of us to