Before luncheon we motored over to Dunkerque.  The road runs along the canal, between grass-flats and prosperous villages.  No signs of war were noticeable except on the road, which was crowded with motor vans, ambulances and troops.  The walls and gates of Dunkerque rose before us as calm and undisturbed as when we entered the town the day before yesterday.  But within the gates we were in a desert.  The bombardment had ceased the previous evening, but a death-hush lay on the town, Every house was shuttered and the streets were empty.  We drove to the Place Jean Bart, where two days ago we sat at tea in the hall of the hotel.  Now there was not a whole pane of glass in the windows of the square, the doors of the hotel were closed, and every now and then some one came out carrying a basketful of plaster from fallen ceilings.  The whole surface of the square was literally paved with bits of glass from the hundreds of broken windows, and at the foot of David’s statue of Jean Bart, just where our motor had stood while we had tea, the siege-gun of Dixmude had scooped out a hollow as big as the crater at Nieuport.

Though not a house on the square was touched, the scene was one of unmitigated desolation.  It was the first time we had seen the raw wounds of a bombardment, and the freshness of the havoc seemed to accentuate its cruelty.  We wandered down the street behind the hotel to the graceful Gothic church of St. Eloi, of which one aisle had been shattered; then, turning another corner, we came on a poor bourgeois house that had had its whole front torn away.  The squalid revelation of caved-in floors, smashed wardrobes, dangling bedsteads, heaped-up blankets, topsy-turvy chairs and stoves and wash-stands was far more painful than the sight of the wounded church.  St. Eloi was draped in the dignity of martyrdom, but the poor little house reminded one of some shy humdrum person suddenly exposed in the glare of a great misfortune.

A few people stood in clusters looking up at the ruins, or strayed aimlessly about the streets.  Not a loud word was heard.  The air seemed heavy with the suspended breath of a great city’s activities:  the mournful hush of Dunkerque was even more oppressive than the death-silence of Ypres.  But when we came back to the Place Jean Bart the unbreakable human spirit had begun to reassert itself.  A handful of children were playing in the bottom of the crater, collecting “specimens” of glass and splintered brick; and about its rim the market-people, quietly and as a matter of course, were setting up their wooden stalls.  In a few minutes the signs of German havoc would be hidden behind stacks of crockery and household utensils, and some of the pale women we had left in mournful contemplation of the ruins would be bargaining as sharply as ever for a sauce-pan or a butter-tub.  Not once but a hundred times has the attitude of the average French civilian near the front reminded me of the gallant cry of Calanthea in The Broken Heart: “Let me die smiling!” I should have liked to stop and spend all I had in the market of Dunkerque...