On the railway lines were many trains, shunted into sidings.  They belonged to the Belgian State Railways, and had been brought over the frontier away from German hands—­hundreds of them.  In their carriages little families of refugees had made their homes.  They are still living in them, hanging their washing from the windows, cooking their meals in these narrow rooms.  They have settled down as though the rest of their lives is to be spent in a siding.  We heard their voices, speaking Flemish, as our train passed on.  One woman was singing her child to sleep with a sweet old lullaby.  In my train there was singing also.  A party of four young Frenchmen came in, forcing their way hilariously into a corridor which seemed packed to the last inch of space.  I learnt the words of the refrain which they sang at every station: 

A bas Guillaume! 
C’est un filou
II faut le pendre
Il faut le pendre
La corde a son cou!

The young Fleming with a pale beard and moustache smiled as he glanced at the Frenchmen.

“They have had better luck,” he said.  “We bore the first brunt.”

I left the train and the friends I had made.  We parted with an “Au revoir” and a “Good luck!” When I went down to the station the next morning I learnt that a train of refugees had been in collision at La Marquise, near Boulogne.  Forty people had been killed and sixty injured.

After their escape from the horrors of Antwerp the people on this train of tragedy had been struck again by a blow from the clenched fist of fate.

4

I went back to Dunkirk again and stayed there for some days in the hope of getting a pass which would allow me to cross the Belgian frontier and enter the zone of battle.  Even to get out of the railway station into this fortified town required diplomacy bordering upon dishonesty, for since the retreat of the Belgian army of volunteers, Dunkirk had an expectation of a siege and bombardment and no civilian strangers were allowed to enter.  Fortunately I was enabled to mention a great name, with the implied and utterly untruthful suggestion that its influence extended to my humble person, so that a French gentleman with a yard-long bayonet withdrew himself from the station doorway and allowed me to pass with my two friends.

It struck me then, as it has a thousand times since the war began, how all precautions must fail to keep out a spy who has a little tact and some audacity.  My two friends and I were provided with worthless passes which failed to comply with official regulations.  We had no authorized business in Dunkirk, and if our real profession had been known we should have been arrested by the nearest French or British officer, sent down to British headquarters under armed guard and, after very unpleasant experiences as criminals of a dangerous and objectionable type, expelled from France with nasty words on our passports.  Yet in spite of spy-mania and a hundred methods of spy-catching,