The captain there hoped to solve the problem of getting his young friends safely to Paris, and the boys certainly wished him the best kind of luck in the effort. Both French approval and English backing would help some in the way of hastening unmolested progress.
On Rue de Moscow the boys discovered that these were days when there was something doing every minute in Calais. Clouds of smoke rose from sputtering motors, whizzing to and fro, some loaded with soldiers, some with food, while others were hastening for the field of battle.
Refugees from almost everywhere in the war zone filled the town to the point of overflow—and such a medley of French and Flemish! Men wearing blood-stained bandages, old women, babies in arms, worn out and half starved.
The great warehouses, the Hotel de Ville, the railway station, lace factories, private residences, and even ships in the harbor, were used as sleeping quarters.
“We can’t get away from it,” sighed Henri, as the party noted a limping procession of Belgian soldiers caked with mud, worn faces covered with three or four weeks’ growth of beard, and who looked like they had exhausted the last drop of energy and patience they had.
“And they are coming in by the thousands,” volunteered a bystander.
The boys waited near the Maritime station while the captain made his visit of state to one in authority, with whom he was well acquainted.
Presently the captain hove in sight, accompanied by a Belgian gendarme, one of the force then engaged in patrolling the city. This was evidently a guard of honor, for the captain had no appearance of being disturbed by arrest.
“Now, youngsters,” he briskly announced, “there is a bit of a conference arranged for you, so put on your best front. It won’t be like a visit to a dentist, I assure you.”
In a street not far removed from the Victoria hotel, the captain ushered his young charges into the vestibule of a pretentious looking residence, and guided by a smiling secretary the visitors were soon in the presence of a man of most distinguished bearing and cordial manner, who instantly rose from his chair behind a desk littered with papers.