At Nieuport-les-Bains one dead soldier lay at the end of the esplanade, and a little group of living were huddled under the wall of a redbrick villa, watching other villas falling like card houses in a town that had been built for love and pretty women and the lucky people of the world. British monitors lying close into shore were answering the German bombardment, firing over Nieuport to the dunes by Ostend. From one monitor came a group of figures with white masks of cotton-wool tipped with wet blood. British seamen, and all blind, with the dead body of an officer tied up in a sack.⁠ ⁠…

“ O Jesu!⁠ ⁠… O maman!⁠ ⁠… O ma pauvre p’tite femme!⁠ ⁠… O Jesu! O Jesu! ”