I was frequently in La Panne after that day.  I got to know well the road from Dunkirk, with its bordering of mud and ditch, its heavy transports, its grey gunboats in the canals that followed it on one side, its long lines of over-laden soldiers, its automobiles that travelled always at top speed.  I saw pictures that no artist will ever paint—­of horrors and beauties, of pathos and comedy; of soldiers washing away the filth of the trenches in the cold waters of canals and ditches; of refugees flying by day from the towns, and returning at night to their ruined houses to sleep in the cellars; of long processions of Spahis, Arabs from Algeria, silhouetted against the flat sky line against a setting sun, their tired horses moving slowly, with drooping heads, while their riders, in burnoose and turban, rode with loose reins; of hostile aeroplanes sailing the afternoon breeze like lazy birds, while shells from the anti-aircraft guns burst harmlessly below them in small balloon-shaped clouds of smoke.

But never in all that time did I overcome the sense of unreality, and always I was obsessed by the injustice, the wanton waste and cost and injustice of it all.  The baby at La Panne—­why should it go through life on stumps instead of legs?  The boyish officer—­why should he have died?  The little sixteen-year-old soldier who had been blinded and who sat all day by the phonograph, listening to Madame Butterfly, Tipperary, and Harry Lauder’s A Wee Deoch-an’-Doris—­why should he never see again what I could see from the window beside him, the winter sunset over the sea, the glistening white of the sands, the flat line of the surf as it crept in to the sentries’ feet?  Why?  Why?

All these wrecks of boys and men, where are they to go?  What are they to do?  Blind and maimed, weak from long privation followed by great suffering, what is to become of them when the hospital has fulfilled its function and they are discharged “cured”?  Their occupations, their homes, their usefulness are gone.  They have not always even clothing in which to leave the hospital.  If it was not destroyed by the shell or shrapnel that mutilated them it was worn beyond belief and redemption.  Such ragged uniforms as I have seen!  Such tragedies of trousers!  Such absurd and heart-breaking tunics!

When, soon after, I was presented to the King of the Belgians, these very questions had written lines in his face.  It is easy to believe that King Albert of Belgium has buried his private anxieties in the common grief and stress of his people.

CHAPTER V

A TALK WITH THE KING OF THE BELGIANS

The letter announcing that I was to have an audience with the King of the Belgians reached me at Dunkirk, France, on the evening of the day before the date set.  It was brief and to the effect that the King would receive me the next afternoon at two o’clock at the Belgian Army headquarters.