Russian prince who stayed two days, and who snored in Russian and kept
two _valets de chambre_ up all night in the hall outside my door
polishing his boots and cleaning his uniform, I was always alone in
that part of the hotel.

At my London hotel I had been lodged on the top floor, and twice in
the night the hall porter had telephoned me to say that German
Zeppelins were on their way to London. So I took care to find that in
the Hotel des Arcades there were two stories and two layers of Belgian
and French officers overhead.

I felt very comfortable--until the air raid. The two stories seemed
absurd, inadequate. I would not have felt safe in the subcellar of the
Woolworth Building.

There were no women in the hotel at that time, with the exception of a
hysterical lady manager, who sat in a boxlike office on the lower
floor, and two chambermaids. A boy made my bed and brought me hot
water. For several weeks at intervals he knocked at the door twice a
day and said: "Et wat." I always thought it was Flemish for "May I
come in?" At last I discovered that he considered this the English for
"hot water." The waiters in the café were too old to be sent to war,
but I think the cook had gone. There was no cook. Some one put the
food on the fire, but he was not a cook.

Dunkirk had been bombarded several times, I learned.

"They come in the morning," said my informant. "Every one is ordered
off the streets. But they do little damage. One or two machines come
and drop a bomb or two. That is all. Very few are killed."