me bread and red wine.
Enough! It was war time, as they said.

"We were in the Paris railroad yards. That is all we saw of Paris--and
in the night. Hard luck!"

They had left the Marne the previous day. By night they could be in
the fight. It did not take long to send reinforcements when the line
was closed to all except military traffic and one train followed close on
the heels of another.

They did not know where they were going; one never knew. Probably
they would get orders at Dunkirk. Father Joffre, when there was a call
for reinforcements, never was in a panicky hurry. He seemed to
understand that the general who made the call could hold out a little
longer; but the reinforcements were always up on time. A long head
had Father Joffre.

Now I am going to say that life was going on as usual at Dunkirk; that
is the obvious thing to say. The nearer the enemy, the more
characteristic that trite observation of those who have followed the
roads of war in Europe. At Dunkirk you might have a good meal
within sound of the thunder of the guns of the British monitors which
were helping the Belgians to hold their line. At Dunkirk most excellent
patisserie was for sale in a confectionery shop. Why shouldn't
tartmakers go on making tarts and selling them? The British naval
reserve officers used to take tea in this shop. Little crowds of citizens
who had nothing to do, which is the most miserable of vocations in
such a crisis, gathered to look at armoured motor-cars which had
come in from the front with bullet dents, which gave them the
atmosphere of battle.

Beyond Dunkirk, one might see wounded Belgians, fresh from the
field of battle, staggering in, crawling in, hobbling in from the havoc of
shell-fire, their first-aid bandages saturated with mud, their ungainly
and impracticable uniforms oozing mud, ghosts of men-these
"schipperkes" of the nation that was unprepared for war who had
done their part, when the only military thought was for more men,
unwounded men, British, French, Belgian, to stem the German tide.
Yet many of these Belgians, even these, were cheerful. They could
still smile and say, "Bonne chance!"

Indeed, there seemed no limit to the cheerfulness of Belgians. At a
hospital in Calais I met a Belgian professor with his head a white ball
of bandages, showing a hole for one eye and a slit for the mouth. He
had been one of the cyclist force which took account of many
German cavalry scouts in the first two