I turned and looked out of the window again.  But I saw nothing of the crowd below.  I saw only a great tide of blood rising higher and higher, and I heard, not the squawking of motor-horns, but the moans of men in innumerable sheds, where they lie on straw waiting for the surgeon’s knife and crying out for morphia.  I saw and heard, because I had seen and heard these things before in France and Belgium.

In the room there was the touch of quiet fingers on a piano not too bad.  It was the music of deep, soft chords.  A woman’s voice spoke quickly, excitedly.

“Oh!  Some one can play.  Ask him to play!  It seems a thousand years since I heard some music.  I’m thirsty for it!”

A friend of mine who had struck the chords while standing before the piano, sat down, and smiled a little over the notes.

“What shall it be?” he asked, and then, without waiting for the answer, played.  It was a reverie by Chopin, I think, and somehow it seemed to cleanse our souls a little of things seen and smelt.  It was so pitiful that something broke inside my heart a moment.  I thought of the last time I had heard some music.  It was in a Flemish cottage, where a young lieutenant, a little drunk, sang a love-song among his comrades, while a little way off men were being maimed and killed by bursting shells.

The music stopped with a slur of notes.  Somebody asked, “What was that?”

There was the echo of a dull explosion and the noise of breaking glass.  I looked out into the square again from the open window, and saw people running in all directions.

Presently a man came into the room and spoke to one of the doctors, without excitement.

“Another Taube.  Three bombs, as usual, and several people wounded.  You’d better come.  It’s only round the corner.”

It was always round the corner, this sudden death.  Just a step or two from any window of war.

27

Halfway through my stay at Dunkirk I made a trip to England and back, getting a free passage in the Government ship Invicta, which left by night to dodge the enemy’s submarines, risking their floating mines.  It gave me one picture of war which is unforgettable.  We were a death-ship that night, for we carried the body of a naval officer who had been killed on one of the monitors which I had seen in action several times off Nieuport.  With the corpse came also several seamen, wounded by the same shell.  I did not see any of them until the Invicla lay alongside the Prince of Wales pier.  Then a party of marines brought up the officer’s body on a stretcher.  They bungled the job horribly, jamming the stretcher poles in the rails of the gangway, and, fancying myself an expert in stretcher work, for I had had a little practice, I gave them a hand and helped to carry the corpse to the landing-stage.  It was sewn up tightly in canvas, exactly like a piece of meat destined for Smithfield market, and was treated with no more ceremony than such a parcel by the porters who received it.