to clear the civil population out of the whole fighting
area--partly to prevent spying and treachery, (which has been
a curse to both armies,) and partly because they would starve.
They are sent to Calais, and then by boat to Havre.

That first Sunday evening an endless procession flowed from
the station to the quays in the drenching rain. Each family
had a perambulator, (a surprisingly handsome one, too,) piled
with sticks of bread, a few bundles of goods, and, when we
peered inside, a couple of crying babies. There were few young
people; mostly it was whimpering, frightened-looking children
and wretched, bent old men and women. It seemed too bad to be
true; even when they brushed past us in the rain we could not
believe that their sodden figures were real. They were
dematerialized by misery in some odd way.

Some of them slept in skating rinks, trucks, some in the
Amiral Ganteaume. (One's senses could not realize that to the
horrors of exile these people had added those of shipwreck
next day.) Some certainly stood in the Booking Hall outside
our hotel all night through. This sort of thing went on all
the week, and was going on when we left.

Nevertheless, I was stirred agreeably by the imagination of the shells
smashing the Emden and the men inside the Emden, and when I read the
other day that the naval guns had destroyed over 4,000 men in the German
trenches about Middlekirche I remarked that we were "doing well." It is
only on the whole that we who want to end war hate and condemn war; we
are constantly lapsing into fierceness, and if we forget this lurking
bellicosity and admiration for hard blows in our own nature then we