reverse sides, upside down and under glass--by some several hundred
sentries, officials and petty highwaymen. It suffered everything but
attack by bayonet. I found myself repeating that way to madness of
Mark Twain's:

_Punch, brothers, punch with care,
Punch in the presence of the passenjaire,
A pink trip slip for a five-cent fare_--

and so on.

Northeast then, in an open grey car with "Belgian Red Cross" on each
side of the machine. Northeast in a bitter wind, into a desolate and
almost empty country of flat fields, canals and roads bordered by
endless rows of trees bent forward like marching men. Northeast
through Gravelines, once celebrated of the Armada and now a
manufacturing city. It is curious to think that a part of the Armada
went ashore at Gravelines, and that, by the shifting of the English
Channel, it is now two miles inland and connected with the sea by a
ship canal. Northeast still, to Dunkirk.

From Calais to Gravelines there had been few signs of war--an
occasional grey lorry laden with supplies for the front; great
ambulances, also grey, and with a red cross on the top as a warning to
aëroplanes; now and then an armoured car. At Gravelines the country
took on a more forbidding appearance. Trenches flanked the roads,
which were partly closed here and there by overlapping earthworks, so
that the car must turn sharply to the left and then to the right to
get through. At night the passage is closed by barbed wire. In one
place a bridge was closed by a steel rope, which a sentry lowered