A sort of spiritual asphyxiation overtook one at last, in which the mere stony Briticism of the London hotel seemed to have a part.  If you awoke again into that taste of soft-coal smoke, went down to another of those staggering lamp-lit breakfasts.  But why staggering?  “Can you not take coffee and rolls in London as well as in some Paris cafe”?  It would seem so, yet it cannot be done.  The mere sight and sound—­or lack of sound—­ of that warm, softly carpeted breakfast-room, moving like some gloomy, inevitable mechanism as it has moved for countless years, attacks the already weakened will like an opiate.  At the first bewildering ’"Q?” from that steely-fronted maid the ritual overpowers you and you bow before porridge, kippers, bacon and eggs, stewed fruit, marmalade, toast, more toast, more marmalade, as helpless as the rabbit before the proverbial boa—­except that in this case the rabbit swallows its own asphyxiator.

Another breakfast like this, another day of rain and fog, another ’"Q?” —­it was in some such state of mind as this that I packed up one night and took the early train for Folkestone.

Folkestone, Friday.

Sunshine at last—­a delicious autumn afternoon—­clean air, quiet, and the sea.  Far below the cliff walk, trawlers crawling slowly in; along the horizon a streak of smoke from some patrolling destroyer or battleship.  And all along this cliff walk, Belgians—­strolling with their children, sitting on the benches, looking out to sea.  Just beyond that hazy white wall to the east—­the cliffs of France—­the fight for Calais is being fought—­they can almost hear the cannon.

In the stillness, as they drift by, you catch bits of their talk: 

“It was two o’clock in the morning when we left Antwerp.”

“And imagine—­it was not three metres from our doorstep that the shell burst.”

“We walked forty kilometres that night and in the morning-------”

On the balcony of some one’s summer-house, now turned into a hospital, four Belgian soldiers, one with his head bandaged, are playing cards—­ jolly, blond youngsters, caps rakishly tipped over one ear, slamming the cards down as if that were the only thing in the world.  In the garden others taking the sunshine, some with their wheel-chairs pushed through the shrubbery close to the high iron fence, to be petted by nurse-maids and children as if they were animals in a sort of zoo.

The Belgians strolling by on the cliff walk smile at this quaint picture, for sun and space and quiet seem to have wiped out their terror—­that passed through is as far away as that now hidden in the east.  Is it merely quiet and sun?  Perhaps it is the look of a “nice little people” who know that now they have a history.  “Refugees,” to be sure, yet one can fancy them looking back some day from their tight little villages, canals, and beet-fields, on afternoons like this, as on the days of their great adventure—­when they could sit in the sun above the sea at Folkestone and look across the Channel to the haze under which their sons and husbands and brothers and King were fighting for the last corner of their country.