were with our men, the men whom I had lately come to know, now lying out on the bare earth in the moonlit trenches, keeping their everlasting vigil and blowing on their fingers numbed with cold.  We reached Dunkirk at 6 A.M.  No explanation why the train had played truant at Calais was vouchsafed me, nor was any hope held out of a return.  In those days I was travelling as a private person, and was not yet endowed with the prerogatives by which, in the name of a Secretary of State, I could requisition cars and impress men to do my bidding.

At a hopeless moment I had the good fortune to fall in with a King’s Messenger, carrying despatches, who was in the next carriage.  He produced his special passports, and the prestige of “Courrier du Roi,” Knight of the Order of the Silver Greyhound, worked a miracle.  Every one was at our service.  We were escorted to the military headquarters of Dunkirk—­through streets already echoing with the march of French infantry, each carrying a big baton of bread and munching as he kept step, to an office in which the courteous commandant was just completing his toilet.  The Consul was summoned, the headquarters hotel of the English officers was rung up, and thither we went through an ambuscade of motor-cars in the courtyard.

A lieutenant of the Naval Flying Squadron was ready for us with his powerful Rolls-Royce, and we were soon on the high road to Calais.  Everywhere were the stratagems of war:  a misty haze of barbed-wire entanglements in the distant fields, deep trenches, earthworks six feet thick masking rows of guns.  Time pressed, but every mile or so we were stopped by a kind of Hampton Court maze, thrown across the road, in the shape of high walls of earth and stone, compelling our lieutenant at the steering-wheel to zigzag in and out, and thereby putting us at the mercy of the sentry who stood beside his hut of straw and hurdles, and presented his bayonet at the bonnet as though preparing to receive cavalry.  The corporal came up, and with him a little group of French soldiers, their cheeks impoverished, their glassy eyes sunk in deep black hollows by their eternal vigil.  “Officier Anglais!” “Courrier du Roi!” we exclaimed, and were sped on our way with a weary smile and “Bonjour! messieurs.”  Women and old men were already toiling in the fields, stooping like the figures in Millet’s “Gleaners,” as we raced through an interminable avenue of poplars, past closed inns, past depopulated farms, past wooden windmills, perched high upon wooden platforms like gigantic dovecots.  At each challenge a sombre word was exchanged about Antwerp—­again that strange telepathy of peril.  Calais at last! and a great empty boat with a solitary fellow-passenger.

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