But not the management.  They would take it away.

The car which came for me had been at the front all night.  It was filled inside and out with mud, so that it was necessary to cover the seat before I got in.  Of all the cars I have ever travelled in, this was the most wrecked.  Hardly a foot of the metal body was unbroken by shell or bullet hole.  The wind shield had been torn away.  Tatters of curtain streamed out in the wind.  The mud guards were bent and twisted.  Even in that region of wrecked cars people turned to look at it.

Calais was very gay that Sunday afternoon.  The sun was out.  At the end of the drawbridge a soldier was exercising a captured German horse.

Officers in scarlet and gold, in pale blue, in green and red, in all the picturesqueness of a Sunday back from the front, were decked for the public eye.  They walked in groups or singly.  There were no women with them.  Their wives and sweethearts were far away.  A Sunday in Calais, indifferent food at a hotel, a saunter in the sunlight, and then—­Monday and war again, with the bright colours replaced by sombre ones, with mud and evil odours and wretchedness.

They wandered about, smoking eternal cigarettes and watching the harbour, where ships were coaling, and where, as my car waited, the drawbridge opened to allow a great Norwegian merchantman to pass.  The blockade was only two days old, but already this Norwegian boat had her name painted in letters ten feet high along each side of her hull, flanked on both sides by the Norwegian flag, also painted.  Her crew, leaning over the side, surveyed the quay curiously.  So this was war—­this petulant horse with its soldier rider, these gay uniforms!

It had been hoped that neutral shipping would, by thus indicating clearly its nationality, escape the attacks of submarines.  That very ship was sunk three days later in the North Sea.

Convalescent soldiers limped about on crutches; babies were wheeled in perambulators in the sun; a group of young aviators in black leather costumes watched a French biplane flying low.  English naval officers from the coaling boats took shore leave and walked along with the free English stride.

There were no guns; everything was gaiety and brightness.  But for the limping soldiers, my own battered machine, and the ominous grey ships in the harbour, it might have been a carnival.

In spite of the appearance of the machine it went northeast at an incredible pace, its dried mud flying off like missiles, through those French villages, which are so tidy because there is nothing to waste; where there is just enough and no more—­no extra paper, no extra string, or food, or tin cans, or any of the litter that goes to make the disorder of a wasteful American town; where paper and string and tin cans and old boots serve their original purpose and then, in the course of time, become flower-pots or rag carpets or soup meat, or heaven knows what; and where, having fulfilled this second destiny, they go on being useful in feeding chickens, or repairing roads, or fertilising fields.