“Where are you going to put that, Dick?”

“Oh, stow it over there, Bill!”

That was how a British hero made his home-coming.

But I had a more horrible shock, although I had been accustomed to ugly sights.  It was when the wounded seamen came up from below.  The lamps on the landing-stage, flickering in the high wind, cast their white light upon half a dozen men walking down the gangway in Indian file.  At least I had to take them on trust as men, but they looked more like spectres who had risen from the tomb, or obscene creatures from some dreadful underworld.  When the German shell had burst on their boat, its fragments had scattered upwards, and each man had been wounded in the face, some of them being blinded and others scarred beyond human recognition.  Shrouded in ship’s blankets, with their heads swathed in bandages, their faces were quite hidden behind masks of cotton-wool coming out to a point like beaks and bloody at the tip.  I shuddered at the sight of them, and walked away, cursing the war and all its horrors.

After my return to Dunkirk, I did not stay very long there.  There was a hunt for correspondents, and my name was on the black list as a man who had seen too much.  I found it wise to trek southwards, turning my back on Belgium, where I had had such strange adventures in the war-zone.  The war had settled down into its winter campaign, utterly dreary and almost without episodes in the country round Furnes.  But I had seen the heroism of the Belgian soldiers in their last stand against the enemy who had ravaged their little kingdom, and as long as life lasts the memory of these things will remain to me like a tragic song.  I had been sprinkled with the blood of Belgian soldiers, and had helped to carry them, wounded and dead.  I am proud of that, and my soul salutes the spirit of those gallant men—­ the remnants of an army—­who, without much help from French or English, stood doggedly in their last ditches, refusing to surrender, and with unconquerable courage until few were left, holding back the enemy from their last patch of soil.  It was worth the risk of death to see those things.

Chapter VIII The Soul Of Paris

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In the beginning of the war it seemed as though the soul had gone out of Paris and that it had lost all its life.

I have already described those days of mobilization when an enormous number of young men were suddenly called to the colours out of all their ways of civil life, and answered that summons without enthusiasm for war, hating the dreadful prospect of it and cursing the nation which had forced this fate upon them.  That first mobilization lasted for twenty-one days, and every day one seemed to notice the difference in the streets, the gradual thinning of the crowds, the absence of young manhood, the larger proportion of women and old fogeys among those who remained.