who had been sheltered in convent schools, now submerged in the great crowd of fugitives, so utterly without the comforts of life that the common decencies of civilization could not be regarded, but gave way to the unconcealed necessities of human nature.  Peasant women, squatting on the dock-sides, fed their babes as they wept over them and wailed like stricken creatures.  Children with scared eyes, as though they had been left alone in the horror of darkness, searched piteously for parents who had been separated from them in the struggle for a train or in the surgings of the crowds.  Young fathers of families shouted hoarsely for women who could not be found.  Old women, with shaking heads and trembling hands, raised shrill voices in the vain hope that they might hear an answering call from sons or daughters.  Like people who had escaped from an earthquake to some seashore where by chance a boat might come for them all, these Belgian families struggled to the port of Dunkirk and waited desperately for rescue.  They were in a worse plight than shipwrecked people, for no ship of good hope could take them home again.  Behind them the country lay in dust and flames, with hostile armies encamped among the ruins of their towns.

For a little while I left these crowds and escaped to the quiet sanctuary of a restaurant in the centre of the town.  I remember that some English officers came in and stared at me from their table with hard eyes, suspicious of me as a spy, or, worse still, as a journalist.  In those days, having to dodge arrest at every turn, I had a most unpatriotic hatred of those British officers whose stern eyes gimletted my soul.  They seemed to me so like the Prussian at his worst.  Afterwards, getting behind this mask of harness, by the magic of official papers, I abandoned my dislike and saw only the virtue of our men.  I remember also that I ate at table opposite a pretty girl, with a wanton’s heart, who prattled to me, because I was an Englishman, as though no war had come to make a mockery of love-in-idleness.  I stood up from the table, upsetting a glass so that it broke at the stem.  Outside the restaurant was the tramp of another multitude.  But the rhythm of those feet was different from the noise I had heard all day.  It was sharper and more marked.  I guessed at once that many soldiers were passing by, and that upon striding to the door I should see another tragedy.  From the doorway I watched an army in retreat.  It was the army of Antwerp marching into Dunkirk.  I took off my hat and watched with bared head.

They were but broken regiments, marching disorderly for the most part, yet here and there were little bodies of men keeping step, with shouldered rifles, in fine, grim pride.  The municipal guards came by, shoulder to shoulder, as on parade, but they were followed by long convoys of mounted men on stumbling horses, who came with heaps of disorderly salvage piled on to dusty wagons.  Saddles and bridles