From The London Daily Mail, Nick Fagge and David Wilkes reporting, we learn [tip of the fedora to GeoffB and Instapundit]:
Riot squads were sent into Calais last night after UK-bound migrants turned the French port into a ‘war zone’.
Anarchy broke out when 250 men burst into the town’s docks and tried to board vessels sailing for Dover.
One gang of marauders broke through gates and climbed over fences in a desperate bid to reach a ferry.
Brushing off pursuing police officers, the migrants stopped only when the ship’s crew turned a fire hose on them and pulled up the car ramps.
…
…lorry driver Lee Croson told ITV: ‘It’s more like a war zone than it used to be. If you get into Calais or park anywhere in Calais you can be 99 per cent sure you will get the immigrants in your trailer.’
He said many drivers are threatened at knifepoint. Anywhere within three hours drive of the port is considered a risk, he added, saying he had not known a worse situation in 20 years.
…
Despite the extra police drafted in, hundreds of migrants at the sprawling camp close to the port vowed to continue their bid to reach Britain.
As Instapundit remarked: The ‘CAMP OF THE SAINTS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FICTION.’
…They had come close, and that was enough to nurture their hope, enough to make it spring to life with extravagant visions of milk and honey flowing untapped into rivers thick with fish, whose waters washed fields fairly bursting with crops, far as the eye could see, growing wild for the taking, where little monster children could ,roll about to their hearts’ content. … The simpler the folk, the stronger the myth. Soon everyone heard their babble, believed their fantasies, and dreamed the same wild dreams of life in the West. The problem is that, in famine-racked Calcutta, “everyone” means quite a few. Could that be one explanation? …
Way back, behind the backmost women in the crowd, a giant of a man stood stripped to the waist, holding something over his head and waving it like a flag. Untouchable pariah, this dealer in droppings, dung roller by trade, molder of manure briquettes, turd eater in time of famine, and holding high in his stinking hands a mass of human flesh. At the bottom, two stumps; then an enormous trunk, all hunched and twisted and bent out of shape; no neck, but a kind of extra stump, a third one in place of a head, and a bald little skull, with two holes for eyes and a hole for a mouth, but a mouth that was no mouth at all—no throat, no teeth—just a flap of skin over his gullet. The monster’s eyes were alive, and they stared straight ahead, high over the crowd, frozen forward in a relentless gaze—except, that is, when his pariah father would wave him bodily back and forth. It was just that lidless gaze that flashed through the bars of the gate and caught the eye of the Consul himself, staring in spellbound horror. He had stepped outside for a look at the crowd, to see what was going on. But it wasn’t the crowd he saw. And all at once he closed his eyes and began to shout:
“No rice! No visas! No anything! You won’t get another thing, do you hear? Now get out! Get out! Every one of you! Out!”
As he turned to rush off, a sharp little stone hit him square on the forehead and left a gash. The monster’s eyes lit up. The quiver that ran through his frame was his way of thanking his father. And that was all. No other act of violence. Yet suddenly the keeper of the milk and honey, stumbling back to his consulate, head in hands, struck the crowd as a rather weak defender of the sacred portals of the Western World. So weak, in fact, that if only they could wait, sooner or later he was bound to drop the keys. Could that be one explanation? …
—Jean Raspail, The Camp Of the Saints, Chapter Five
