She did not belong to any one going out. She was one of those dreadful things you see in London, with a big hat heaped with feathers, and draggled tails of hair. I think she had a red dress. She came up to us under the windows of the train, and stood nodding her dreadful feathers and waving her dreadful hands and calling things out. She called out, "Oh, it's all very fine now, you laugh now--but you won't laugh long. You won't laugh out there. And who of you'll come back and laugh, my pretty boys, my gay boys?" Nobody dared take notice of her. If any one of us had taken notice of her, nobody could have borne it. There seemed to be no guard about to stop her, and not one of us dared admit that she was there. "My pretty boys, my gay boys," she kept calling out, "you laugh now, my poor boys, but you won't laugh long." There were some little Frenchmen, cooks, I think, or waiters, from some smart hôtel, going to join the colours. They were in a third-class carriage next to the carriage of the British officers. They heard the woman calling out like that. They were little pasty-faced cooks or waiters. But they began to sing. They began to sing the Marseillaise to drown the woman's voice out. They did it just for us, our men going out, there on the platform. Our men began to whistle it and hum it and stamp it. And we tried to. The crazy woman called out those terrible things, that were so true. And our men and the little Frenchmen sang and whistled and stamped. And so did we. And the train went out like that. Paris, end of September I have come home for six days. "I am here," I keep saying to myself, "I am here, at home," as if I could not believe it. And those homeless people, that they begged for at all the stations where the train stopped on our way, those driven, herded people, stupid from horror they have passed through, helpless, in my home I keep imagining them. Where the train stopped in the dark at half-lit stations, people of the Red Cross came asking help, "Pour nos blessés, pour nos refugiés." Somehow, in my little rooms, it is the refugees I see the more plainly. There is the young woman with the wheelbarrow, and the old woman, the grandmother, with the baby, the young man carrying the old man on his shoulders, the little brother and sister with the bundle. I see them toiling down the white road, turning back wild looks toward the smoke of their home. They had to leave the cow, but the old dog followed them. I see them in some strange place. They can go no farther. They do not care where they are, or what happens to them. They have looked upon the end of all that they had ever known. Once, when the train stopped at a very small station, where one could smell the fields all close about and sweet, there was a woman's voice pleading; one heard her, as she came from door to door, along the train, in the dark, "For our homeless; we have thousands and thousands of homeless----" Her voice trailed on in the dark.