flickering in the high wind, cast their
white light upon half a dozen men walking down the gangway in
Indian file. At least I had to take them on trust as men, but they
looked more like spectres who had risen from the tomb, or obscene
creatures from some dreadful underworld. When the German shell
had burst on their boat, its fragments had scattered upwards, and
each man had been wounded in the face, some of them being
blinded and others scarred beyond human recognition. Shrouded in
ship's blankets, with their heads swathed in bandages, their faces
were quite hidden behind masks of cotton-wool coming out to a point
like beaks and bloody at the tip. I shuddered at the sight of them, and
walked away, cursing the war and all its horrors.

After my return to Dunkirk, I did not stay very long there. There was a
hunt for correspondents, and my name was on the black list as a
man who had seen too much. I found it wise to trek southwards,
turning my back on Belgium, where I had had such strange
adventures in the war-zone. The war had settled down into its winter
campaign, utterly dreary and almost without episodes in the country
round Furnes. But I had seen the heroism of the Belgian soldiers in
their last stand against the enemy who had ravaged their little
kingdom, and as long as life lasts the memory of these things will
remain to me like a tragic song. I had been sprinkled with the blood of
Belgian soldiers, and had helped to carry them, wounded and dead. I
am proud of that, and my soul salutes the spirit of those gallant men--
the remnants of an army--who, without much help from French or
English, stood doggedly in their last ditches, refusing to surrender,
and with unconquerable courage until few were left, holding back the
enemy from their last patch of soil. It was worth the risk of death to
see those things.

Chapter VIII
The Soul Of Paris

1

In the beginning of the war it seemed as though the soul had gone
out of Paris and that it had lost all its life.

I have already described those days of mobilization when an
enormous number of young men were suddenly called to the colours
out of all their ways of civil life, and answered that summons without
enthusiasm for war, hating the dreadful prospect of it and cursing the
nation which had forced this fate upon them. That first mobilization
lasted for twenty-one days, and every day one seemed to notice the
difference in the streets, the gradual thinning o