Northeast still, to Dunkirk.
From Calais to Gravelines there had been few signs of war--an
occasional grey lorry laden with supplies for the front; great
ambulances, also grey, and with a red cross on the top as a warning to
aeroplanes; now and then an armoured car. At Gravelines the country
took on a more forbidding appearance. Trenches flanked the roads,
which were partly closed here and there by overlapping earthworks, so
that the car must turn sharply to the left and then to the right to
get through. At night the passage is closed by barbed wire. In one
place a bridge was closed by a steel rope, which a sentry lowered
after another operation on the pink slip.
The landscape grew more desolate as the daylight began to fade, more
desolate and more warlike. There were platforms for lookouts here and
there in the trees, prepared during the early days of the war before
the German advance was checked. And there were barbed-wire
entanglements in the fields. I had always thought of a barbed-wire
entanglement as probably breast high. It was surprising to see them
only from eighteen inches to two feet in height. It was odd, too, to
think that most of the barbed wire had been made in America. Barbed
wire is playing a tremendous part in this war. The English say that
the Boers originated this use for it in the South African War.
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