staircase sticking out from the debris.  The roof, the floors, and the greater part of the walls might never have existed.  In the Place in front of the Cathedral were two holes where shells had fallen, and either of them would have comfortably held a motor-car.  The children were all together in a little street a quarter of a mile west of the Cathedral, just where the last three shells had fallen.  Fortunately they had hurt no one, though one had passed clean through the upper stories of a house where there were several children being got ready by one of our party for removal.  By good luck through some defect it did not explode, or the house would have been annihilated and everyone in it killed.  Quite a collection of people had congregated in that little street, though why they considered it safer than the rest of the town I do not know.  At first they were very unwilling to let any of the children go at all.  But at last about twenty children were collected and were packed into ambulances.  Some of them were without parents, and were being looked after by the neighbours, and the parents of some absolutely refused to leave.  More children and a few adults to look after them were found later, and I think that in the end about a hundred were taken up to Fumes, to be sent on to Calais as refugees.

The children were as merry as crickets, and regarded it all as a huge joke; sitting in the ambulances, they looked for all the world like a school treat.  But I have often wondered whether we were right to take them away or whether it would not have been better to have left them to take their chance.  War is a very terrible thing, and the well-meant interference of the kind-hearted may do far more harm than good.  What is going to happen to those children?  I suppose that they are in some refugee home, to remain there till the war is over.  And then?  We did our best to identify them, but what are the chances that many of them will ever see their parents again?  From what I have seen of these things I do not think that they are very large.  Perhaps you will say that the parents ought to have gone with them.  It is easy for the well-to-do to leave their homes and to settle again elsewhere; but the poorer a man is the less can he afford to leave what little he possesses.  In their own town they might be in danger, but at least they had not lost their homes, and they possessed the surroundings without which their individual lives would be merged in the common ocean of misery.  The problem of the civil population, and especially of the children, in time of war is entirely beyond the scope of individual effort.  It is a matter with which only a Government or a very powerful organization can deal, and it is a matter in which Governments do not take a great deal of interest.  Their hands are quite full enough in trying to defeat the enemy.