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"And to-morrow?" I asked. Again the shoulders shrugged under the uniform. "Ah, monsieur!" he exclaimed helplessly. "Malheureusement, to-morrow I am not free; nor the day after. Parbleu! I cannot tell monsieur when I shall be free." "I understand, Pierre," said I. Before sundown the next afternoon I was after a hare through a maze of thicket running back of the dunes fronting the open sea.
"He could not tell what instinct had guided him back to camp; but all through that awful day he had stumbled on through the roasting heat of the dunes, till late at night when I had seen him and gone to meet him as I described.
At Larkin and Sutter Streets, two men and a woman broke from the police and rushed into a burning apartment house, never to reappear. The rush to the parks and the dunes was followed in the days that followed by as wild a rush to the ferries, due to the mad desire to escape anywhere, in any way, from the burning city. At the ferry station on Wednesday night there was much confusion.
Their ships were at anchor close to the shore; but Prince Maurice frankly told his men that it was useless to think of embarking in case of defeat, and that, therefore, they must either win the day or perish there, for the Spaniards were before them under the protection of Nieuport, the river divided them, the sea was behind them, and it would be impossible for a beaten army to escape by retreating through the dunes in the direction of Ostend.
There are, in Western France, extensive ranges of dunes covered with ancient and dense forests, while the recently formed sand-hills between them and the sea are bare of vegetation, and in some cases are rapidly advancing upon the wooded dunes, which they threaten to bury beneath their drifts.
They follow the drum that is beaten among the dunes. They are afraid of life because they know it has two kinds of gifts, and one they snatch at, and one they would refuse. And they are afraid still more of the door that all must enter, Sultan and Nomad he who has washed himself and made the threefold pilgrimage, and he who is a leper and is eaten by flies. So it is.
This fact, the geological bearing of which is obvious, is not noticed by previous French writers or even by Andresen, though a semi-lunar outline has been long generally ascribed to inland dunes.
Arising, without disturbing his wife, he sought his shoes. The chalk signatures were undisturbed! He dressed himself and stole out softly. This time the tide was in, so he crossed the dunes and struck the shore on the further side of the quicksand. There, oh, horror of horrors! he saw his own footprints dying into the abyss! He went home a desperately sad man.
As it was impossible to take the ambulance into the dunes, it was left in the rear in charge of Jones, while the others threaded their way in and out the devious passages toward the front. They had covered fully a mile in this laborious fashion before they came upon a detachment of Belgian infantry which was lying in wait for a call to action.
I looked around me: on one side empty dunes, orchards, and meadows, without house or steeple; on the other, the blue and misty sea, empty to where distant islets were profiled black on the horizon. A faintness overcame me, and I felt myself dissolve. For all of a sudden a second ripple of voice swept over the lagoon, a shower of little notes, which seemed to form a little mocking laugh.