This square in Dunkirk contained many of the elements which go to make up the actions and reactions of this war.  It seemed to me that a clever stage manager desiring to present to his audience the typical characters of this military drama—­leaving out the beastliness, of course—­would probably select the very people and groups upon whom I was now looking down from the window.  Motor-cars came whirling up with French staff officers in dandy uniforms (the stains of blood and mud would only be omitted by Mr. Willie Clarkson).  In the centre, just below the statue of Jean-Bart, was an armoured-car which a Belgian soldier, with a white rag round his head, was explaining to a French cuirassier whose long horse-hair queue fell almost to his waist from his linen-covered helm.  Small boys mounted the step and peered into the wonder-box, into the mysteries of this neat death-machine, and poked grubby fingers into bullet-holes which had scored the armour-plates.  Other soldiers—­Chasseurs Alpins in sky-blue coats, French artillery men in their dark-blue jackets, Belgian soldiers wearing shiny top-hats with eye-shades, or dinky caps with gold or scarlet tassels, and English Tommies in mud-coloured khaki—­ strolled about the car, and nodded their heads towards it as though to say, “That has killed off a few Germans, by the look of it.  Better sport than trench digging.”

The noise of men’s voices and laughter—­they laugh a good deal in war time, outside the range of shells—­came up to the open window; overpowered now and then by the gurgles and squawks of motor-horns, like beasts giving their death-cries.  With a long disintegrating screech there came up a slate-grey box on wheels.  It made a semicircular sweep, scattering a group of people, and two young gentlemen of the Royal Naval Air Service sprang down and shouted “What-ho!” very cheerily to two other young gentlemen in naval uniforms who shouted back “Cheer-o!” from the table under my balcony.

I knew all of them, especially one of the naval airmen who flies what he calls a motor-bus and drops bombs with sea curses upon the heads of any German troops he can find on a morning’s reconnaissance.  He rubs his hand at the thought that he has “done in” quite a number of the “German blighters.”  With a little luck he hopes to nobble a few more this afternoon.  A good day’s work like this bucks him up wonderfully, he says, except when he comes down an awful whop in the darned old motor-bus, which is all right while she keeps going but no bloomin’ use at all when she spreads her skirts in a ploughed field and smashes her new set of stays.  Oh, a bad old vixen, that seaplane of his!  Wants a lot of coaxin’.