French rescuers packed their gear with well-practiced efficiency.
Medical tents.
A stretcher.
Security cordons.
Soon after the last bodies were wheeled off the quay in Boulogne, the remaining ambulances left, leaving only a small group of officials standing in the fading light next to some frayed fishing nets near the harbor wall.
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"This is so disturbing," said Frédéric Couvillier, the mayor of Boulogne, of the way the long, ever-evolving crisis has reshaped and changed France's northern coast.
"These people are fleeing death and end up dying here. Women, children, convinced that they will find a better life across the English Channel," said Couvillier, pointing to the west, towards the gray sea.
Immediately after such incidents there is, I have noticed, having witnessed several already this year, a widening gap in the way the French and the British react to them.
In Great Britain, officials were quick to condemn the smuggling gangs.
Every incident, every death is considered the result of criminal activity.
Which, of course, it is.
And this time, the smugglers crammed too many people into what looked like boats, with not nearly enough life jackets.
Here in northern France, the police do the same.
They are busy watching the coast.
They now have more manpower, vehicles, night-vision equipment and special drones that can detect groups of migrants hiding in the dunes.
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But police are aware that as they expand their operations - much of which is now funded by British taxpayers - smuggling gangs are responding, finding new ways of crossing, often putting the migrants themselves at increasing risk.
The gangs now go inland by boat, from the canals or far down the French coast, which means a much longer journey to cross a busy stretch of water packed with merchant ships and exposed to strong currents.
Inflatable boats are of increasingly dubious quality and are crowded with people - sometimes 90 of them on a boat designed to hold 40 people.
It's a problem that's getting worse as the authorities manage to disrupt the supply of ships brought ashore from deep in Europe.
And more and more smugglers use violence.
Sometimes they throw stones at the police, and they also use knives.
I recently reviewed footage shown to me by officers at the local gendarmerie, which appeared to be another fierce battle on the beach at dawn, with officers with shields fending off a shower of rocks.
I myself witnessed the fight in April.
The goal of the smugglers is to secure a few precious seconds while they throw the ships and passengers into the sea, after which the police, worried that they could be accused of exposing people to even greater risk, rarely intervene.
But while the police have their duties and the dangers they face, for French politicians and civilians in resorts along this coast, the reaction to yet another deadly incident is not to focus on the criminal activities of smugglers, but on the motives of migrants, on what so many of them and further forces them to expose themselves to danger.
That this is Britain's fault, I have been told so many times by many - from local mayors, pensioners, couples who walk their dogs on the beaches where they now fear that they might come across the bodies found on the shore.
Having watched this crisis unfold over decades, from camps around the Channel Tunnel and ferry ports, to this more recent phenomenon of small boats, many French people feel deeply how their lives and communities have been transformed by a crisis they see as a British product.
The French Minister of the Interior, Žerald Darman, spoke about this on Tuesday, September 3 in the port of Boulogne.
He condemned the smugglers, but much of his commentary dealt with the poorly regulated UK labor market, which like a magnet attracts young Eritreans, determined Sudanese, Afghans, Syrians and Iranians to these shores, convinced that if they can cross the latter, a small part of the water, or at least half of it, end up in a country where they can find work, even without proper documentation.
Darman called, as he has done many times before, for a new migrant deal between Britain and the European Union.
He also touched on the widespread belief here in France that no matter how much effort is put into suppressing the smuggling gangs, it will never be enough.
As if this crisis was triggered by the demands of tens of thousands of determined migrants, and not by the profit-making motives of a loose network of criminals.
There is another difference in the way Britain and France react to such moments.
This can be seen in newspaper headlines and on television.
The small boat crisis may be big news in the UK, but in France - a country currently preoccupied with political unrest and, frankly, fed up with the situation on the north coast - even twelve deaths in the English Channel hardly attract any media attention.
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