Calais
without rifles. As their trains passed now I could see them studying the
mechanism and fondling their new firearms.

Coming in through the suburbs of Dunkirk we passed hundreds of children
perched on the fences singing the Marseillaise. Nor were their voices
flat and colorless like most school children's. They felt every word
they sang, and they put their little hearts into it. Looking back along
the side of the cars at the faces of soldiers leaning out, I could see
they were touched by the faith of the children.

[Sidenote: In Dunkirk.]

As I rattled along on the cobbles of Dunkirk half an hour later I heard
an explosion with a note unfamiliar to me. It sounded close, too, but it
did not seem to bother the people of the street. A few children ran
behind their mothers' skirts and a young girl hurried from the middle of
the street to the protection of an archway, but that was all.

Standing up in the fiacre I could see a thin smoke about three hundred
feet away in a garden in the direction from which the explosion came,
and high in the evening sky I could barely make out an aeroplane. "A
German bomb?" I asked the driver in some excitement.

"Oh, yes," he replied, cracking his whip, "we usually get three or four
every afternoon about this time, but they have not hurt any one."

Dunkirk that night answered the description of what a threatened town
which was not afraid should look like. It had none of the depressing
atmosphere of Calais. All the refugees and the wounded were passed on
to a safer place. It was full of French, English, and Belgian soldiers,
with a scattering of sailors and breezy officers from both the French
and English navies. They kept the waiters in the cafes on the run, and
there was only an occasional bandage showing from under a cap or around
a hand to indicate these men were engaged in any more serious business
than a man[oe]uvre.

[Sidenote: Armored motor-car.]

In the street, however, in front of the statue of Jean Bart, an armored
Belgian motor-car was standing. It was built with a turret where the
tonneau usually is and it was covered with thick sheet steel right down
to the ground. Just in front of the driver was a slit with a lip
extending over it, giving it somewhat the effect of the casque belonging
to an ancient suit of armor. That was the only opening except the one
for the barrel of the rapid-fire gun in the turret. The armor was dented
in a dozen places where bullets had gl