ith my 70-pound bag before I
even knew "things were ready"; and she said she did not roll it down the
five flights from my room. She carried it every stair step of the way.
Her husband was in the war, and she had five children and it required
more than a few sous in the week for five children, the eldest fourteen.
I agreed that it did.

Swinging on to the jetty, we had to take notice of a shop advertising to
rent life-saving apparatus for the trip across the Channel. It was
fine--a one-piece suit which came from the toes to the ears and a hood
which you could turn in over your head! There was a painting of a
torpedoed passenger ship going up in flames, topside and the hull
settling down into the rolling billows. Men and women were jumping into
the sea and drowning in agony. They had no life-saving, one-piece suits.
But all were not so thoughtless. There were others floating along high
out of water with the most beatific expressions on their faces. They had
been thoughtful enough to buy one of the patent one-piece suits. The
painting was in colors, red and black mostly.

The afternoon had closed in showers, and when we made the steamer
landing we stood in pools of water in the hollows of the worn stone
flags. We were in good time, but a hundred or more who had been in
better time were already inside the shed. The hold-overs from three days
were there, military people mostly. We waited--and waited--and waited.
It was the eternal passport matter. One at a time they had to pass the
tribunal inside. A pleasant-mannered young English soldier stood guard
at the shed door. Every half-hour or so, at command of a voice from the
inside, he would let another dozen or twenty slide by. When he did so,
those of us in the rear would hurry to fill the void, picking up our
baggage from our feet as we pushed on. I had hired a porter, an old man,
to look after my 70-pound bag. He stood by patiently for two hours or
so. Then, without warning, he ran off and did not come back. I had not
paid him, so he must have grown very tired. After that, whenever I moved
forward, I had to pick up my two bags myself--the other weighed 40
pounds. Sometimes I put the bags into a pool of water--sometimes I put
my feet.

Not every one had to wait. An officer would be passed through
immediately, which did not please two enlisted men near me, just back
from what they called rough work at the front. The little one, called
Scotty, had a fear that the boat migh