The rest of the documents relate to the laws that govern the free passage, and the certificates to the effect that the relative is unable to pay necessary expenses required before passage is granted, every emergency being admirably prepared for.
Walking out after some necessary shopping, I noticed how the Wimereux road has changed—is changing. Often during the winter months we tramped along in the blinding rain wondering at the loneliness of it all, meeting none but pickets at the barricades, the storm-swept roads lighted every twenty minutes by a passing tram!
And now? Spring is beginning to show in every cranny. The few trees are bursting with buds. The road is one incessant rush of cars. The once sleepy-looking fort, with its visible guns facing the sea, booms an occasional shot across the bows of a defaulting vessel, and French soldiers manœuvre on the cliffs.
It seems as if spring had put life into everything. To the left a camp hospital is springing up, and khaki figures toil away with ropes and canvas. To the right, by the sea, walls of earth are being thrown up that look like trenches, but are in reality drains.
Even the men from the trenches are full of the dramatic contrasts of warfare in spring—the song of the lark or nightingale interrupted by the bursting of the "Jack Johnsons"; the burned trees and sprouting buds. They tell us, too, most extraordinary tales of women being found in the German trenches we have recently gained: some maintain they were French civilian prisoners; others that they were the wives of some of the front-trench Huns. At any rate, the extraordinary fact remains that they really were there.
March 19th. With the aid of a fatigue party of R.A.M.C. men I succeeded in getting the upstairs rooms of our place into a semblance of order. The French staff, too, were invaluable, nothing being too much trouble for the pauvres blessés. Anxieties never come singly, and to-day proved our heaviest day owing to an influx of Canadians and an army of navvies in Government employment. No sooner were things straight than in came our first two "wounded relatives"—as we have decided to dub our guests. Weary, dazed, helpless as children, there was nothing to do but find them some hot supper and get them to bed, with promises of conducting them to the hospital the first thing in the morning.
There being no cupboards in the hostel, we have set to work to make them out of old packing-cases, and with the remnants of our curtains and old tablecloths we find them to be, if not beautiful, quite as serviceable as could be expected.
One difficulty we cannot overcome is the odour from the cesspool that forms our drainage system, and makes one of the valuable rooms quite untenantable and another hardly aromatic!
March 21st. On our way home last night we paused a moment to look at the sky.