The French wounded, too, were silent, as if in the presence of a crisis which overwhelmed personal thoughts.  Help was needed at the front; they knew it.  On sixty trains in one day sixty thousand French passed through Calais.  With a pass from the French commandant at Calais, I got on board one of these trains down at the railroad yards at dawn.  This lot were Turcos, under the command of a white-haired veteran of African campaigns.  An utter change of atmosphere from the freight shed!  Perhaps it is only the wounded who have time to think.  My companions in the officers’ car were as cheery as the brown devils whom they led.  They had come from the trenches on the Marne, and their commissariat was a boiled ham, some bread and red wine.  Enough!  It was war time, as they said.

“We were in the Paris railroad yards.  That is all we saw of Paris—­and in the night.  Hard luck!”

They had left the Marne the previous day.  By night they could be in the fight.  It did not take long to send reinforcements when the line was closed to all except military traffic and one train followed close on the heels of another.

They did not know where they were going; one never knew.  Probably they would get orders at Dunkirk.  Father Joffre, when there was a call for reinforcements, never was in a panicky hurry.  He seemed to understand that the general who made the call could hold out a little longer; but the reinforcements were always up on time.  A long head had Father Joffre.

Now I am going to say that life was going on as usual at Dunkirk; that is the obvious thing to say.  The nearer the enemy, the more characteristic that trite observation of those who have followed the roads of war in Europe.  At Dunkirk you might have a good meal within sound of the thunder of the guns of the British monitors which were helping the Belgians to hold their line.  At Dunkirk most excellent patisserie was for sale in a confectionery shop.  Why shouldn’t tartmakers go on making tarts and selling them?  The British naval reserve officers used to take tea in this shop.  Little crowds of citizens who had nothing to do, which is the most miserable of vocations in such a crisis, gathered to look at armoured motor-cars which had come in from the front with bullet dents, which gave them the atmosphere of battle.

Beyond Dunkirk, one might see wounded Belgians, fresh from the field of battle, staggering in, crawling in, hobbling in from the havoc of shell-fire, their first-aid bandages saturated with mud, their ungainly and impracticable uniforms oozing mud, ghosts of men-these “schipperkes” of the nation that was unprepared for war who had done their part, when the only military thought was for more men, unwounded men, British, French, Belgian, to stem the German tide.  Yet many of these Belgians, even these, were cheerful.  They could still smile and say, “Bonne chance!”

Indeed, there seemed no limit to the cheerfulness of Belgians.  At a hospital in Calais I met a Belgian professor with his head a white ball of bandages, showing a hole for one eye and a slit for the mouth.  He had been one of the cyclist force which took account of many German cavalry scouts in the first two weeks of the war.  A staff motor-car had run over him on the road.