like a piece of meat destined for Smithfield market, and was treated
with no more ceremony than such a parcel by the porters who
received it.

"Where are you going to put that, Dick?"

"Oh, stow it over there, Bill!"

That was how a British hero made his home-coming.

But I had a more horrible shock, although I had been accustomed to
ugly sights. It was when the wounded seamen came up from below.
The lamps on the landing-stage, flickering in the high wind, cast their
white light upon half a dozen men walking down the gangway in
Indian file. At least I had to take them on trust as men, but they
looked more like spectres who had risen from the tomb, or obscene
creatures from some dreadful underworld. When the German shell
had burst on their boat, its fragments had scattered upwards, and
each man had been wounded in the face, some of them being
blinded and others scarred beyond human recognition. Shrouded in
ship's blankets, with their heads swathed in bandages, their faces
were quite hidden behind masks of cotton-wool coming out to a point
like beaks and bloody at the tip. I shuddered at the sight of them, and
walked away, cursing the war and all its horrors.

After my return to Dunkirk, I did not stay very long there. There was a
hunt for correspondents, and my name was on the black list as a
man who had seen too much. I found it wise to trek southwards,
turning my back on Belgium, where I had had such strange
adventures in the war-zone. The war had settled down into its winter