The same urgency hurries off supplies from the ships. The Admiralty is shouting continuously for the completion of discharge. No ship, at this time, lies there at her ease. She fairly groans and creeks in travail of discharge. It proceeds as vigorously at night, under the flares, as by day. Hordes of labour battalions are handling it into the store-hangars, or into the waiting supply-trams, or into lorries. The parti-coloured French are trundling the wine-barrels hither and thither for store or for despatch. The rattle of cranes, the panting of lorries, the scream and rumble of trains, the shouting of orders, are deafening and incessant. Supply-ships, timber-ships, coal-ships, wine-ships, ammunition-ships, petrol-ships, are strung down-stream in a deafening queue. The base is a distractingly busy place. Over against all that is the quiet domesticity of the barges. War doesn't hurry them, nor sap at the foundations of their family life. They'll sleep along the river, happen what may. General Joffre's professed aspiration _après la guerre_ is to retire to a Seine barge, and finish there. He could choose nothing in sharper contrast with the turmoil of war. The reaction from Generalship could not well be borne in more complementary circumstances. The comfortable somnolence of a Seine barge is invincible. They are not yet requisitioned for the base purposes of war. They are a thing apart, and therefore have no call for busyness. They are enormously long, and have a grace of outline unexampled in the world of barges. A Thames barge is stumpy and crude beside them. There is scope in their length for grace of line. Look down on them from the heights of Bonsecours, packed orderly amongst the Seine islands. Look at them in queue dreaming along in the wake of some fussy tug; either way you'll get their nobility of contour. Each is a microcosm. They are self-contained as to family, burden, poultry, pony, cat and dog, rabbit-pen, and garden. The mother and daughter and the small boys all take a hand in pushing on the business of _le père_. In fact, it is they who do the thing: he lounges and smokes and directs the policy. In the waist of the ship is the stable, with a pony that usually is white, and perhaps a cow, and the pens of hens, and the basketed rabbit-hutch. The boys pursue the dog round the potted plants when there's no work. In the same circumstances the mother and daughters sun themselves on the hatches. Children are born there to a lifelong sojourn in the craft. There they get their schooling, and there, until adolescence, they acquire their knowledge of the world. There probably is scope for a science of barge-psychology. Can one in reason expect a world war to intrude far into the life of a Seine barge? Hardly that. They hold as much as a small ship; the journey to Paris is far and slow. They are cut off from the world almost as effectually as a marooned Swiss Family Robinson.