Calais then, with food to get and an address to find.  For Doctor Depage had kindly arranged a haven for me.  Food, of a sort, I got at last.  The hotel dining room was full of officers.  Near me sat fourteen members of the aviation corps, whose black leather coats bore, either on left breast or left sleeve, the outspread wings of the flying division.  There were fifty people, perhaps, and two waiters, one a pale and weary boy.  The food was bad, but the crisp French bread was delicious.  Perhaps nowhere in the world is the bread average higher than in France—­just as in America, where fancy breads are at their best, the ordinary wheat loaf is, taking the average, exceedingly poor.

Calais was entirely dark.  The Zeppelin attack, which took place four or five weeks later, was anticipated, and on the night of my arrival there was a general feeling that the birthday of the German Emperor the next day would produce something spectacular in the way of an air raid.  That explained, possibly, the presence so far from the front—­fifty miles from the nearest point—­of so many flying men.

As my French conversational powers are limited, I had some difficulty in securing a vehicle.  This was explained later by the discovery the next day that no one is allowed on the streets of Calais after ten o’clock.  Nevertheless I secured a hack, and rode blithely and unconsciously to the house where I was to spend the night.  I have lost the address of that house.  I wish I could remember it, for I left there a perfectly good and moderately expensive pair of field glasses.  I have been in Calais since, and have had the wild idea of driving about the streets until I find it and my glasses.  But a close scrutiny of the map of Calais has deterred me.  Age would overtake me, and I should still be threading the maze of those streets, seeking an old house in an old garden, both growing older all the time.

A very large house it was, large and cold.  I found that I was expected; but an air of unreality hung over everything.  I met three or four most kindly Belgian people of whom I knew nothing and who knew nothing of me.  I did not know exactly why I was there, and I am sure the others knew less.  I went up to my room in a state of bewilderment.  It was a huge room without a carpet, and the tiny fire refused to light.  There was a funeral wreath over the bed, with the picture of the deceased woman in the centre.  It was bitterly cold, and there was a curious odor of disinfectants in the air.

By a window was a narrow black iron bed without a mattress.  It looked sinister.  Where was the mattress?  Had its last occupant died and the mattress been burned?  I sniffed about it; the odour of disinfectant unmistakably clung to it.  I do not yet know the story of that room or of that bed.  Perhaps there is no story.  But I think there is.  I put on my fur coat and went to bed, and the lady of the wreath came in the night and talked French to me.