I remember, also, seeing women, with their hats flopping down in their
faces and their hair all streaming, dragging huge trunks across the
floor; and if all of us had not been in the same distressful fix we
could have appreciated the humor of the spectacle of a portly high
dignitary of the United States Medical Corps shoving a truck piled high
with his belongings, and shortly afterward, with the help of his own
wife, loading them on the roof of an infirm and wheezy taxicab.

From Liverpool across to London we traveled through a drowsy land
burdened with bumper crops of grain, and watched the big brown hares
skipping among the oat stacks; and late at night we came to London. In
London next day there were more troops about than common, and recruits
were drilling on the gravel walks back of Somerset House; and the people
generally moved with a certain sober restraint, as people do who feel
the weight of a heavy and an urgent responsibility. Otherwise the
London of wartime seemed the London of peacetime.

So within a day our small party, still seeking to slip into the wings of
the actual theater of events rather than to stay so far back behind the
scenes, was aboard a Channel ferryboat bound for Ostend, and having for
fellow travelers a few Englishmen, a tall blond princess of some royal
house of Northern Europe, and any number of Belgians going home to
enlist. In the Straits of Dover, an hour or so out from Folkestone, we
ran through a fleet of British warships guarding the narrow roadstead
between France and England; and a torpedo-boat destroyer sidled up and
took a look at us.

Just off Dunkirk a French scout ship talked with us by the language of
the whipping signal flags; but the ordinary Channel craft came and went
without hindrance or seeming fear, and again it was hard for us to make
ourselves believe that we had reached a zone where the physical,
tangible business of war went forward.

And Ostend and, after Ostend, the Belgian interior--those were
disappointments too; for at Ostend bathers disported on the long,
shining beach and children played about the sanded stretch. And, though
there were soldiers in sight, one always expects soldiers in European
countries. No one asked to see the passports we had brought with us,
and the customs officers gave our hand baggage the most perfunctory of
examinations. Hardly five minutes had elapsed after our landing before
we were steaming away on our train through a l