A lieutenant of the Naval Flying Squadron was ready for us with his powerful Rolls-Royce, and we were soon on the high road to Calais. Everywhere were the stratagems of war: a misty haze of barbed-wire entanglements in the distant fields, deep trenches, earthworks six feet thick masking rows of guns. Time pressed, but every mile or so we were stopped by a kind of Hampton Court maze, thrown across the road, in the shape of high walls of earth and stone, compelling our lieutenant at the steering-wheel to zigzag in and out, and thereby putting us at the mercy of the sentry who stood beside his hut of straw and hurdles, and presented his bayonet at the bonnet as though preparing to receive cavalry. The corporal came up, and with him a little group of French soldiers, their cheeks impoverished, their glassy eyes sunk in deep black hollows by their eternal vigil. "Officier Anglais!" "Courrier du Roi!" we exclaimed, and were sped on our way with a weary smile and "Bonjour! messieurs." Women and old men were already toiling in the fields, stooping like the figures in Millet's "Gleaners," as we raced through an interminable avenue of poplars, past closed inns, past depopulated farms, past wooden windmills, perched high upon wooden platforms like gigantic dovecots. At each challenge a sombre word was exchanged about Antwerp--again that strange telepathy of peril. Calais at last! and a great empty boat with a solitary fellow-passenger. * * * * * He was a London wine-merchant of repute, who had got here at last from Rheims, whither he had gone to pay his yearly inspection of the champagne vintage, only to find the red wine-press of war. Three weeks he had lived like primitive man in the wine-cellars of Rheims, with the shells screaming overhead--screaming, he says, just like the long-drawn sobbing whistle of an express train as it leaves a tunnel. Never has he lived such days before; never, he fervently prays, will he live them again. From his narrative I got a glimpse of a subterranean existence, as tenebrous and fearful as the deepest circle of Dante's _Inferno_, with a river of tears falling always in the darkness of the vaults. A great wine-cellar--there are ten miles of them at Rheims--crowded with four thousand people, lighted only by candles, and swarming with huge rats; the blanched faces of women, the crying of children, the wail of babies at the breast. Overhead the crash of falling masonry--the men had armed themselves with big iron pikes to hew their way out in case the vaults fell in. Life in these catacombs was one long threnody of anguish. Outside, the conscious stone of the great monument of mediaeval aspiration was being battered to pieces, and the glorious company of the apostles, the goodly fellowship of the martyrs, suffered another and a less resurgent martyrdom. After days of this crepuscular existence he emerged to find the cathedral less disfigured than he had feared. One