A fine-looking young Frenchman who had a shell-wound in the thigh was being lifted onto the table. He shuddered with pain, as he clenched his teeth; yet when the dressing was finished he was able to breathe his thanks. On the seat was a Congo negro who had been with one of the Belgian regiments, coal black and thick-lipped, with bloodshot eyes; an unsensitised human organism, his face as expressionless as his bare back with holes made by shell-fragments. A young Frenchwoman-- she could not have been more than nineteen--with a face of singular refinement, sprayed his wounds with the definiteness of one trained to such work, though two days before it had probably never occurred to her as being in the possibilities of her existence. Her coolness and the coolness of the other women in their silent activity had a charm that went with one’s devout respect. The French wounded, too, were silent, as if in the presence of a crisis which overwhelmed their personal thoughts. Help was needed at the front; they knew it. On sixty trains in one day sixty thousand French passed through Calais. With a pass from the French commandant at Calais, I got aboard one of these trains down at the railroad yards at dawn. This lot were Turcos, in command of a white-haired veteran of African campaigns. An utter change of atmosphere from the freight shed! Perhaps it is only the wounded who have time to think. My companions in the officers’ car were as cheery as the brown devils whom they led. They had come from the trenches on the Marne, and their commissariat was a boiled ham, some bread and red wine. Enough! It was war time, as they said. “We were in the Paris railroad yards. That is all we saw of Paris, and in the night. Hard luck!” They had left the Marne the previous day. By night they could be in the fight. It did not take long to send reinforcements when the line was closed to all except military traffic and one train followed close on the heels of another. They did not know where they were going. One never knew where. Probably they would get orders at Dunkirk. Father Joffre, when there was a call for reinforcements never was in a panicky hurry about it. He seemed to understand that the general who made the call could hold out a little longer; but the reinforcements were always up on time. A long head had Father Joffre.