hem."

CHAPTER XX

DUNKIRK: FROM MY JOURNAL

I wakened early this morning and went to church--a great empty place,
very cold but with the red light of the sanctuary lamp burning before
a shrine. There were perhaps a dozen people there when I went in.
Before the Mater Dolorosa two women in black were praying with
upturned eyes. At the foot of the Cross crouched the tragic figure of
the Mother, with her dead Son in her arms. Before her were these other
mothers, praying in the light of the thin burning candles. Far away,
near the altar, seven women of the Society of the Holy Rosary were
conducting a private service. They were market women, elderly, plain,
raising to the altar faces full of faith and devotion, as they prayed
for France and for their soldier-children.

Here and there was a soldier or a sailor on his knees on a low
prie-dieu, his cap dangling loose in his hands. Unlike the women, the
lips of these men seldom moved in prayer; they apparently gazed in
wordless adoration at the shrine. Great and swelling thoughts were
theirs, no doubt, kindled by that tiny red flame: thoughts too big for
utterance or even for form. To go out and fight for France, to drive
back the invaders, and, please God, to come back again--that was what
their faces said.

Other people came in, mostly women, who gathered silently around the
Mater Dolorosa. The great empty Cross; the woman and the dead Christ
at the foot of it; the quiet, kneeling people before it; over all, as
the services began, the silvery bell of the Mass; the bending backs of
the priests before the altar; the sound of fresh, boyish voices
singing in the choir--that is early morning service in the great
Gothic church at Dunkirk.

Onto this drab and grey and grieving picture came the morning
sunlight, through roof-high windows of red and yellow and of that warm
violet that glows like a jewel. The candles paled in the growing
light. A sailor near me gathered up his cap, which had fallen unheeded
to the floor, and went softly out. The private service was over; the
market women picked up their baskets and, bowing to the altar,
followed the sailor. The great organ pleaded and cried out. I stole
out. I was an intruder, gazing at the grief of a nation.

It was a transformed square that I walked through on my way back to
the hotel. It was a market morning. All week long it had been crowded
with motor ambulances, lorries, passing guns. Orderlies had held
cavalry h