2 November.—­I have been spending a couple of nights in Dunkirk, where I went to meet Miss Fyfe.  The Invicta got in late because the Hermes had been torpedoed and they had gone to her assistance.  No doubt the torpedo was intended for the Invicta, which carries ammunition, and is becoming an unpopular boat in consequence.  Forty of the Hermes men were lost.

Dunkirk is full of people, and one meets friends at every turn.  I had tea at the Consulate one afternoon, and was rather glad to get away from the talk of shells and wounds, which is what one hears most of at Furnes.

I saw Lord Kitchener in the town one day; he had come to confer with Joffre, Sir John French, Monsieur Poincare, and Mr. Churchill, at a meeting held at the Chapeau Rouge Hotel.  Rather too many valuable men in one room, I thought—­especially with so many spies about!  Three men in English officers’ uniforms were found to be Germans the other day and taken out and shot.

The Duchess of Sutherland has a hospital at our old Casino at Malo les Bains, and has made it very nice.  I had a long chat with a Coldstream man who was there.  He told me he was carried to a barn after being shot in the leg and the bone shattered.  He lay there for six days before he was found, with nothing to eat but a few biscuits.  He dressed his own wound.

“But,” he said, “the string of my puttee had been driven in so far by the shot I couldn’t find it to get the thing off, so I had to bandage over it.”

I went down to the station one day to see if anything could be done for the wounded there.  They are coming in at the rate of seven hundred a day, and are laid on straw in an immense goods-shed.  They get nothing to eat, and the atmosphere is so bad that their wounds can’t be dressed.  They are all patient, as usual, only the groans are heartbreaking sometimes.  We are arranging to have soup given to them, and a number of ambulance men arrived who will remove them to hospital ships and trains.  But the goods-shed is a shambles, and let us leave it at that.[1]

[1] It must not be thought that in this and in subsequent passages referring to the sufferings of the wounded Miss Macnaughtan alludes to any hardships endured by British troops.  Her time in Flanders was all spent behind the French and Belgian lines.—­ED.

Mrs. Knocker came into Dunkirk for a night’s rest while I was staying there.  She had been out all the previous day in a storm of wind and rain driving an ambulance.  It was heavy with wounded, and shells were dropping very near.  She—­the most courageous woman that ever lived—­was quite unnerved at last.  The glass of the car she was driving was dim with rain and she could carry no lights, and with this swaying load of injured men behind her on the rutty road she had to stick to her wheel and go on.

Some one said to her, “There is a doctor in such-and-such a farmhouse, and he has no dressings.  You must take him these.”