If the onlooker were seized with a desire to throttle the young jackanapes he stifled it with the consoling thought that he, too, was doing his bit, and might turn aside to note that the bronzed Indian Staff Major at the entrance to the hatchway was being addressed by his General.
"That isn't mine?" he asked, pointing to a frailly packed paper parcel of awkward dimensions held together by a frayed piece of string.
"No, sir. That's something Colonel M—— got for his son in Paris—toys!" he added in an awestruck whisper that sounded like a sigh.
The General turned on his heels, also with a sigh, and an "I see!"
Perhaps they both thought of days when their sons, too, were safe in the nursery.
I followed the crowd down to the saloon and fed on what there was—coffee and ship's biscuit. Being only a civilian, and a wreck at that, I was served with a gentle consideration that bordered on contempt. Longingly my thoughts wandered to the buffet on the Quai.
The sun and the tide rose higher and higher, the gangway sloped upwards to the deck instead of downwards as when we came aboard. I looked at the well-ordered crowd and closed my eyes. In an instant the Boulogne of eighteen months ago came back to me, the Boulogne that knew War and the horrors of War.
I saw before me the vast consignments of goods that lay along the quayside, destined, one realised helplessly, never to reach their owners. Overcrowded, understaffed ambulance trains steamed into the station—trains that once bore us to the Sunny South—disgorging their sad burdens, who lay on stretchers in the never-ceasing rain, awaiting the arrival of hospital ships.
Many died in the rain in those days, until that Medical Officer was inspired to haul them into the disused sugar-shed clearing station. Where once stood the mortuary is now the innocuous Censor's office. In place of the cheerless barn, whose walls could tell so many tales, a well-ordered post office.