kirk, and I came in time to see amazing scenes in that
port of France. They were scenes which, even now as I write months
afterwards, stir me with pity and bring back to my imagination an
immense tragedy of history.

2

The town of Dunkirk, from which I went out to many adventures in the
heart of war, so that for me it will always hold a great memory, was on
that day in October a place of wild chaos, filled with the murmur of
enormous crowds, and with the steady tramp of innumerable feet
which beat out a tragic march. Those weary footsteps thumping the
pavements and the cobble-stones, made a noise like the surging of
waves on a pebble beach--a queer, muffled, shuffling sound, with a
rhythm in it which stupefied one's senses if one listened to it long. I
think something of this agony of a people in flight passed into my own
body and brain that day. Some sickness of the soul took possession
of me, so that I felt faint and overcome by black dejection. There was
a physical evil among those vast crowds of Belgians who had come
on foot, or in any kind of vehicle, down the big, straight roads which
led to France, and now struggled down towards the docks, where
thousands were encamped. From their weariness and inevitable
dirtiness, from the sweat of their bodies, and the tears that had dried
upon their cheeks, from the dust and squalor of bedraggled clothes,
there came to one's nostrils a sickening odour. It was the stench of a
nation's agony. Poor people of despair! There was something
obscene and hideous in your miserable condition. Standing
among your women and children, and your old grandfathers and
grandmothers, I was ashamed of looking with watchful and observant
eyes. There were delicate ladies with their hats awry and their hair
dishevelled, and their beautiful clothes bespattered and torn, so that
they were like the drabs of the slums and stews. There were young
girls who had been sheltered in convent schools, now submerged in
the great crowd of fugitives, so utterly without the comforts of life that
the common decencies of civilization could not be regarded, but gave
way to the unconcealed necessities of human nature. Peasant
women, squatting on the dock-sides, fed their babes as they wept
over them and wailed like stricken creatures. Children with scared
eyes, as though they had been left alone in the horror of darkness,
searched piteously for parents who had been separated from them in
the struggle for a trai