the Belgian Army at the front and the French Army in billets and on
reserve. This time I was to see the French Army in action.

The first step to that end, getting out of Calais, proved simple
enough. The car came from Dunkirk, and brought passes. I took more
influenza medicine, dressed and packed my bag. There was some little
regret mingled with my farewell to the hotel at the Gare Maritime. I
had had there a private bath, with a porcelain tub. More than that,
the tub had been made in my home city. It was, I knew, my last glimpse
of a porcelain tub, probably of any tub, for some time. There were
bath towels also. I wondered if I would ever see a bath towel again. I
left a cake of soap in that bathroom. I can picture its next occupant
walking in, calm and deliberate, and then his eye suddenly falling on
a cake of soap. I can picture his stare, his incredulity. I can see
him rushing to the corridor and ringing the fire bell and calling the
other guests and the strangers without the gates, and the boot boy in
an apron, to come and see that cake of soap.

But not the management. They would take it away.

The car which came for me had been at the front all night. It was
filled inside and out with mud, so that it was necessary to cover the
seat before I got in. Of all the cars I have ever travelled in, this
was the most wrecked. Hardly a foot of the metal body was unbroken by
shell or bullet hole. The wind shield had been torn away. Tatters of
curtain streamed out in the wind. The mud guards were bent and
twisted. Even in that region of wrecked cars people turned to look at
it.

Calais was very gay that Sunday afternoon. The sun was out. At the end
of the drawbridge a soldier was exercising a captured German horse.

Officers in scarlet and gold, in pale blue, in green and red, in all
the picturesqueness of a Sunday back from the front, were decked for
the public eye. They walked in groups or singly. There were no women
with them. Their wives and sweethearts were far away. A Sunday in
Calais, indifferent food at a hotel, a saunter in the sunlight, and
then--Monday and war again, with the bright colours replaced by sombre
ones, with mud and evil odours and wretchedness.

They wandered about, smoking eternal cigarettes and watching the
harbour, where ships were coaling, and where, as my car waited, the
drawbridge opened to allow a great Norwegian merchantman to pass. The
blockade was only two days old, but already this No