A battery of French artillery rattled over the cobblestones.  The wheels were caked with clay, and the guns were covered with a grey dust.  They were going up Dixmude way, or along to Ramscapelle.  The men sat their horses as though they were glued to the saddles.  One of them had a loose sleeve pinned across his chest, but a strong grip on his bridle with his left hand.  The last wheels rattled round the corner, and a little pageant, more richly coloured, came across the stage.  A number of Algerian Arabs strode through the square, with a long swinging gait.  They were wearing blue turbans above the flowing white “haik” which fell back upon their shoulders, and the white burnous which reached to their ankles.  They were dark, bearded men; one of them at least with the noble air of Othello, the Moor, and with his fine dignity.

They stared up at the statue of Jean-Bart, and asked a few questions of a French officer who walked with a shorter step beside them.  It seemed to impress their imagination, and they turned to look back at that figure with the raised sword and the plumed hat.  Three small boys ran by their side and held out grubby little hands, which the Arabs shook, with smiles that softened the hard outlines of their faces.

Behind them a cavalcade rode in.  They were Arab chiefs, on little Algerian horses, with beautifully neat and clean limbs, moving with the grace of fallow deer across the flagged stones of Dunkirk.  The bridles glistened and tinkled with silver plates.  The saddles were covered with embroidered cloths.  The East came riding to the West.  These Mohammedans make a religion of fighting.  It has its ritual and its ceremony—­even though shrapnel makes such a nasty mess of men.

So I stood looking down on these living pictures of a city in the war zone.  But now and again I glanced back into the room behind the window, and listened to the scraps of talk which came from the lounge and the scattered chairs.  There was a queer collection of people in this room.  They, too, had some kind of business in the job of war, either to kill or to cure.  Among them was a young Belgian lieutenant who used to make a “bag” of the Germans he killed eaeh day with his mitrailleuse until the numbers bored him and he lost count.  Near him were three or four nurses discussing wounds and dying wishes and the tiresome hours of a night when a thousand wounded streamed in suddenly, just as they were hoping for a quiet cup of coffee.  A young surgeon spoke some words which I heard as I turned my head from the window.

“It’s the frightful senselessness of all this waste of life which makes one sick with horror...”

Another doctor came in with a tale from Ypres, where he had taken his ambulances under shell-fire.

“It’s monstrous,” he said, “all the red tape!  Because I belong to a volunteer ambulance the officers wanted to know by what infernal impudence I dared to touch the wounded.  I had to drive forty miles to get official permission, and could not get it then...  And the wounded were lying about everywhere, and it was utterly impossible to cope with the numbers of them...  They stand on etiquette when men are crying out in agony!  The Prussian caste isn’t worse than that.”