The explosion were incessant now.  With each one the landlady downstairs screamed.  As they came closer, cries and French adjectives came up the staircase beside me in a nerve-destroying staccato of terror.

At nine-thirty, when the aeroplanes had been overhead for three-quarters of an hour, there came a period of silence.  There were no more explosions.

“It is over,” said one of the Belgian officers, smiling.  “It is over, and madame lives!”

But it was not over.

I took advantage of the respite to do the forbidden thing and look out through one of the windows.  The moon had come up and the square was flooded with light.  All around were silent houses.  No ray of light filtered through their closed and shuttered windows.  The street lamps were out.  Not an automobile was to be seen, not a hurrying human figure, not a dog.  No night prowler disturbed that ghastly silence.  The town lay dead under the clear and peaceful light of the moon.  The white paving stones of the square gleamed, and in the centre, saturnine and defiant, stood uninjured the statue of Jean Bart, privateer and private of Dunkirk.

Crash again!  It was not over.  The attack commenced with redoubled fury.  If sound were destructive the little town of Dunkirk would be off the map of Northern France to-day.  Sixty-seven bombs were dropped in the hour or so that the Germans were overhead.

The bombardment continued.  My feet were very cold, my head hot.  The lady manager was silent; perhaps she had fainted.  But Emil reappeared for a moment, his round white face protruding above the staircase well, to say that a Zeppelin was reported on the way.

Then at last silence, broken soon by the rumble of ambulances as they started on their quest for the dead and the wounded.  And Emil was wrong.  There was no Zeppelin.  The night raid on Dunkirk was history.

The lights did not come on again.  From that time on for several weeks Dunkirk lay at night in darkness.  Houses showing a light were fined by the police.  Automobiles were forbidden the use of lamps.  One crept along the streets and the roads surrounding the town in a mysterious and nerve-racking blackness broken only by the shaded lanterns of the sentries as they stepped out with their sharp command to stop.

The result of the raid?  It was largely moral, a part of that campaign of terrorisation which is so strangely a part of the German system, which has set its army to burning cities, to bombarding the unfortified coast towns of England, to shooting civilians in conquered Belgium, and which now sinks the pitiful vessels of small traders and fishermen in the submarine-infested waters of the British Channel.  It gained no military advantage, was intended to gain no military advantage.  Not a soldier died.  The great stores of military supplies were not wrecked.  The victims were, as usual, women and children.  The houses destroyed