In London next day there were more troops about than common, and recruits were drilling on the gravel walks back of Somerset House; and the people generally moved with a certain sober restraint, as people do who feel the weight of a heavy and an urgent responsibility.

Otherwise the London of wartime seemed the London of peacetime.
So within a day our small party, still seeking to slip into the wings of the actual theater of events rather than to stay so far back behind the scenes, was aboard a Channel ferryboat bound for Ostend, and having for fellow travelers a few Englishmen, a tall blond princess of some royal house of Northern Europe, and any number of Belgians going home to enlist.

In the Straits of Dover, an hour or so out from Folkestone, we ran through a fleet of British warships guarding the narrow roadstead between France and England; and a torpedo-boat destroyer sidled up and took a look at us.
Just off Dunkirk a French scout ship talked with us by the language of the whipping signal flags; but the ordinary Channel craft came and went without hindrance or seeming fear, and again it was hard for us to make ourselves believe that we had reached a zone where the physical, tangible business of war went forward.
And Ostend and, after Ostend, the Belgian interior--those were disappointments too; for at Ostend bathers disported on the long, shining beach and children played about the sanded stretch.

And, though there were soldiers in sight, one always expects soldiers in European countries.

No one asked to see the passports we had brought with us, and the customs officers gave our hand baggage the most perfunctory of examinations.