THE NIGHT RAID ON DUNKIRK

I found that a room had been engaged for me at the Hotel des Arcades.  It was a very large room looking out over the public square and the statue of Jean Bart.  It was really a princely room.  No wonder they showed it to me proudly, and charged it to me royally.  It was an upholstered room.  Even the doors were upholstered.  And because it was upholstered and expensive and regal, it enjoyed the isolation of greatness.  The other people in the hotel slept above or underneath.

There were times when I longed for neighbours, when I yearned for some one to occupy the other royal apartment next door.  But except for a Russian prince who stayed two days, and who snored in Russian and kept two valets de chambre up all night in the hall outside my door polishing his boots and cleaning his uniform, I was always alone in that part of the hotel.

At my London hotel I had been lodged on the top floor, and twice in the night the hall porter had telephoned me to say that German Zeppelins were on their way to London.  So I took care to find that in the Hotel des Arcades there were two stories and two layers of Belgian and French officers overhead.

I felt very comfortable—­until the air raid.  The two stories seemed absurd, inadequate.  I would not have felt safe in the subcellar of the Woolworth Building.

There were no women in the hotel at that time, with the exception of a hysterical lady manager, who sat in a boxlike office on the lower floor, and two chambermaids.  A boy made my bed and brought me hot water.  For several weeks at intervals he knocked at the door twice a day and said:  “Et wat.”  I always thought it was Flemish for “May I come in?” At last I discovered that he considered this the English for “hot water.”  The waiters in the cafe were too old to be sent to war, but I think the cook had gone.  There was no cook.  Some one put the food on the fire, but he was not a cook.

Dunkirk had been bombarded several times, I learned.

“They come in the morning,” said my informant.  “Every one is ordered off the streets.  But they do little damage.  One or two machines come and drop a bomb or two.  That is all.  Very few are killed.”

I protested.  I felt rather bitter about it.  I expected trouble along the lines, I explained.  I knew I would be quite calm when I was actually at the front, and when I had my nervous system prepared for trouble.  But in Dunkirk I expected to rest and relax.  I needed sleep after La Panne.  I thought something should be done about it.

My informant shrugged his shoulders.  He was English, and entirely fair.

“Dunkirk is a fortified town,” he explained.  “It is quite legitimate.  But you may sleep to-night.  The raids are always daylight ones.”

So I commenced dinner calmly.  I do not remember anything about that dinner.  The memory of it has gone.  I do recall looking about the dining room, and feeling a little odd and lonely, being the only woman.  Then a gun boomed somewhere outside, and an alarm bell commenced to ring rapidly almost overhead.  Instantly the officers in the room were on their feet, and every light went out.