That was a Sunday morning. The Anglican parson at matins later tried lamely to reassure a sparse congregation by preaching futilely from the text: "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night." The latter end of his discourse was drowned in the pitiful _Zaghareet_ raised by the Egyptian women next door: they had lost a man in the night. Their shrill, ear-splitting wail submerged the sermon. There was an end of reassurance--even supposing it had ever begun. The raid had come close on the heels of the Casino dance. The Casino is the best hotel in Port Said, which is to say a good deal. Every Saturday night the Casino "gives" a dance to the quality of the Port. There you will see the best. It's always worth going to. Quite half the European population of the town is composed of the British Government officials and their wives and daughters, English visitors from the mail-boat _en route_, the French Canal Company's officials and their families, and the wives of British naval and military officers stationed here. There is probably as pure a quality of European beauty, well-breeding, and accomplishment as you'll meet outside Britain and France. The women and the naval officers know how to dance. So much cannot be said of the Army's representatives. They consist chiefly in stout Colonels and somewhat young and frisky Subalterns. But apart from that, they may not carry with them the ballroom gear that a naval officer can stow in his quasi-permanent home. A valise or a kit-bag is another thing from a sea-chest, nor is a moving tent a snug and cupboarded cabin. Especially the French flappers, with their delicate transparent beauty, dance with an exquisite grace, and the French dowager-chaperons sit at an end of the room far less sedately than British duennas. The English Subalterns who can speak French find the flappers rising easily to the level of their spirits in the intervals on the dimly-lit piazza; and they probably are not ungrateful that the fear of a nocturnal bombardment from the sea has extorted from the authorities an order obliging the proprietor to subdue his sea-front lights. They're great nights. There's no such stuff in anybody's thoughts as Taubes. Yet on that Sunday morning many a girl and many a dowager could hardly have put head to pillow before the first bomb crashed. A little earlier timing on the part of Fritz, and the sound of revelry by night would have been far more rudely hushed than was that of Brussels long ago by the distant gun on the eve of Waterloo. The period of this war is surcharged with dramatic situations more intense than were held by Belgium's capital then. But there is no Byron to limn them.