It leaves you pointing, I say, at that distant harbour, thirty odd
miles off, but over all those miles it has vanished. The ghost of the
legends cannot march along it any more. In one place you find a few
yards of it about three miles south and east of Montreuil. It may be
that the little lane leading into Estree shows where it crossed the
valley of the Cauche, but it is all guesswork, and therefore very proper
to the huntsman.
Then there is that unbroken line by which St. Martin came, I think, when
he rode into Amiens, and at the gate of the town cut his cloak in two to
cover the beggar. It drives across country for Roye and on to Noyon, the
old centre of the Kings. It is a great modern road all the way, and it
stretches before you mile after mile after mile, until suddenly, without
explanation and for no reason, it ends sharply, like the life of a man.
It ends on the slopes of the hill called Choisy, at the edge of the wood
which is there. And seek as you will, you will never find it again.
From that road also, near Amiens, branches out another, whose object was
St. Quentin, first as a great high road, lost in the valley of the
Somme, a lesser road again, still in one strict alignment, it reaches on
to within a mile of Vermand, and there it stops dead. I do not think
that between Vermand and St. Quentin you will find it. Go out
north-westward from Vermand and walk perhaps five miles, or seven: there
is no trace of a road, only the rare country lanes winding in and out,
and the open plough of the rolling land.
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