All Aboard
Five o'clock is the climax. The people of Calais come out by the hundred to line the harbour and cheer the returning English. It is not easy. For some, urgency has lost its mean- ing; they would as soon stay and forget. Yet in each group one or two are sufficiently sober. One youth carries a man who might be fifty years his senior. He hustles him up the gangway; at the top the old man falls and is all but overboard. His face has a look of terror as awareness breaks through of what almost hap- pened. Yet the young, too, are in difficulties. One, man arrives insensible, carried by two gen- darmes, and the French cheer louder than ever. He will sleep all the way back. As the funnel hoots some arc still coming; they go through the actions of running, but they are hardly moving. They are like people out of slow-motion film. They make it.
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