← catalogue

The Soul of the War

by Philip Gibbs · English · Gutenberg #11682 · 755,532 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Soul of the War
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Soul of the War

Author: Philip Gibbs


        
Release date: March 1, 2004 [eBook #11682]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11682

Credits: E-text prepared by A. Langley


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF THE WAR ***

THE SOUL OF THE WAR

by PHILIP GIBBS

with an Introduction by ANTHONY LANGLEY
written for Project Gutenberg







Contents


   I. The Foreboding
  II. Mobilization
 III. The Secret War
  IV. The Way Of Retreat
   V. The Turn Of The Tide
  VI. Invasion
 VII. The Last Stand Of The Belgians
VIII. The Soul Of Paris
  IX. The Soldiers Of France
   X. The Men In Khaki
      Conclusion



Introduction


This book is a companion book to another book by Philip Gibbs that is
already in the Project Gutenberg library, namely _Now It Can Be Told_[1].
Together, both books constitute the war-time memoirs of British
war-correspondent Philip Gibbs, one of the few officially accredited
journalists allowed on the British sector of the Western front. He
covered the war from beginning to end. _The Soul of the War_ is the
first part of his memoirs, published in 1915, _Now It Can Be Told_ is the
second part, but published immediately after the war. Taken together,
both books are amongst the most important and influential books published
in English during the Great War, being in no small part responsible for
the emergence of the "Lost Generation" myth of the 1920's.

A pre-war best-selling author and journalist, Philip Gibbs was one of
the most outstanding British war-time reporters and writers. Like many
reporters in the opening months of the war, Philip Gibbs and his
companions seemed to posses the knack for being in the wrong place at
the wrong time, following armies across northern France in the vain
hope of being on hand to witness battle. He never really succeeded
during the first year, aside from joining a British volunteer ambulance
service on the Ypres front in late 1914. But while other reporters
unashamedly spruced up their reporting, dramatizing and glorifying
small insignificant incidents and passing occurrences of no import,
Gibbs knew how to talk to soldiers coming from or going to the front
lines, how to convey their thoughts and fears and vividly describe
their battle experiences. Gibbs was a very serious writer, and
extremely proficient at his trade. He knew how to get to the essence of
things, to describe the feel of the times, the general attitude, and
the hopes and fears of both fighting men and civilians. Not only is
this voluminous book a brilliantly written commentary on the opening
months of the war, it is also infused with an inner sadness that could
well be considered a precursor to the post-war "lost generation" myth,
which is yet another indicator at how well Gibbs could gage the feel of
the times and assess its impact on future developments in society.

In this first book of his, he tells of his wanderings during the first
year of the war, as he tried (in vain) to witness the fighting in
France. His observations, descriptions and opinions are however well
worth reading; they are accurate, insightful and to the point. He gives
detailed descriptions of both British and French soldiers and includes
an incredibly atmospheric portrait of Paris during the opening months
of the war as well as a moving account of his time spent with the
British Field Hospital in Furnes. After being arrested in 1915 on
general principle by the British authorities as a nuisance and
potential loose-lipped journalist, he was afterwards appointed one of
the few officially accredited journalists attached to the British
forces on the Western front. Thereafter Gibbs continued filing
dispatches till the end of hostilities. His writing is heartily
sympathetic to the common soldier and war-time refugees, but quite
critical to those in power. After the war he was knighted for his
valuable patriotic services and enjoyed a distinguished career as
novelist and writer.

He served yet again as accredited reporter during the opening months of
the Second World War, being billeted in the same areas in France as
during the Great War. After the evacuation of the BEF in 1940 he
remained in Great Britain. His son followed in his footsteps, taking up
the profession of war reporter for the British press.

                                         Anthony Langley


     [1] Now It Can Be Told, by Philip Gibbs, is Project Gutenberg
         E-book #3317, nicbt10.txt and nicb10.zip. See
         https://www.gutenberg.org/etext02/nicbt10.txt
         or
         https://www.gutenberg.org/etext02/nicbt10.zip





Chapter I
The Foreboding



1


What man may lay bare the soul of England as it was stirred during
those days of July when suddenly, without any previous warning, loud
enough to reach the ears of the mass of people, there came the
menace of a great, bloody war, threatening all that had seemed so
safe and so certain in our daily life? England suffered in those
summer days a shock which thrilled to its heart and brain with an
enormous emotion such as a man who has been careless of truth
and virtue experiences at a "Revivalist" meeting or at a Catholic
mission when some passionate preacher breaks the hard crust of his
carelessness and convinces him that death and the judgment are
very near, and that all the rottenness of his being will be tested in the
furnace of a spiritual agony. He goes back to his home feeling a
changed man in a changed world. The very ticking of the clock on the
mantelpiece of his sitting-room speaks to him with a portentous,
voice, like the thunder-strokes of fate. Death is coming closer to him
at every tick. His little home, his household goods, the daily routine of
his toil for the worldly rewards of life, his paltry jealousies of
next-door neighbours are dwarfed to insignificance. They no
longer matter, for the judgment of God is at hand. The smugness
of his self-complacency, his life-long hypocrisy in the shirking of
truth, are broken up. He feels naked, and afraid, clinging only to
the hope that he may yet have time to build up a new character,
to acquire new spiritual strength, and to do some of the things he
has left undone--if only he had his time over again!--before the
enemy comes to grips with him in a final bout.

That, with less simplicity and self-consciousness, was the spirit of
England in those few swift days which followed the Austrian ultimatum
to Serbia, and Germany's challenge to France and Russia. At least in
some such way one might express the mentality of the governing,
official, political, and so-called intellectual classes of the nation who
could read between the lines of diplomatic dispatches, and saw,
clearly enough, the shadow of Death creeping across the fields of
Europe and heard the muffled beating of his drum.

Some of our public men and politicians must have spent tortured
days and nights in those last days of July. They, too, like the sinner at
the mission service, must have seen the judgment of God
approaching them. Of what, avail now were their worldly ambitions
and their jealousies? They too had been smug in their self-
complacency, hypocrites, shirkers of truth and stirrers up of strife,
careless of consequences. If only they could have their time over
again! Great God! was this war with Germany an unavoidable horror,
or, if the worst came, was there still time to cleanse the nation of its
rottenness, to close up its divisions and to be ready for the frightful
conflict?


2


All things were changed in England in a day or two. The things that
had mattered no longer mattered. The Arming of Ulster and the
Nationalists, Votes for Women, Easier Divorce, the Craze for Night
Clubs--had any of these questions any meaning now? A truce was
called by the men who had been inflaming the people's passion to the
point of civil war. The differences of political parties seemed futile and
idiotic now that the nation itself might be put to the uttermost test of
endurance by the greatest military power in Europe. In fear, as well as
with a nobler desire to rise out of the slough of the old folly of life,
the leaders of the nation abandoned then-feuds. Out of the past
voices called to them. Their blood thrilled to old sentiments and old
traditions which had seemed to belong to the lumber-room of history,
with the moth-eaten garments of their ancestors. There were no
longer Liberals or Conservatives or Socialists, but only Englishmen,
Scotsmen, Irishmen and Welshmen, with the old instincts of race and
with the old fighting qualities which in the past they had used against
each other. Before the common menace they closed up their ranks.


3


Yet there was no blood-lust in England, during those days of July.
None of the old Jingo spirit which had inflamed great crowds before
the Boer War was visible now or found expression. Among people of
thoughtfulness there was a kind of dazed incredibility that this war
would really happen, and at the back of this unbelief a tragic
foreboding and a kind of shame--a foreboding that secret forces were
at work for war, utterly beyond the control of European democracies
who desired to live in peace, and a shame that civilization itself, all
the ideals and intellectual activities and democratic progress of
modern Europe, would be thrust back into the primitive barbarities
of war, with its wholesale, senseless slaughter, its bayonet slashings
and disembowellings--"heroic charges" as they are called by the
journalists--and its gospel of hatred. So humanity was still beastlike,
as twenty centuries ago, and the message of Christianity was still
unheard? Socialistic theories, Hague conventions, the progress of
intelligence in modern democracy had failed utterly, and once again,
if this war came upon the world, not by the will of simple peoples, but
by the international intrigues of European diplomats, the pride of a
military caste and the greed of political tradesmen, the fields of
Europe would be drenched with the blood of our best manhood and
Death would make an unnatural harvesting. Could nothing stop this
bloody business?


4


I think the Middle Classes in England--the plain men and women who
do not belong to intellectual cliques or professional politics--were
stupefied by the swift development of the international "situation," as it
was called in the newspapers, before the actual declarations of war
which followed with a series of thunder-claps heralding a universal
tempest. Was it true then that Germany had a deadly enmity against
us, and warlike ambitions which would make a shambles of Europe?
Or was it still only newspaper talk, to provide sensations for the
breakfast table? How could they tell, these plain, ignorant men who
had always wanted straightforward facts?

For years the newspaper press of England had been divided over
Germany's ambitions, precisely as, according to their political colour,
they had been divided over Tariff Reform or Home Rule for Ireland.
The Liberal Press had jeered at the hair-raising fears of the
Conservative Press, and the latter had answered the jeers by more
ferocious attacks upon German diplomacy and by more determined
efforts to make bad blood between the two nations. The Liberal
Press had dwelt lovingly upon the brotherly sentiment of the German
people for their English cousins. The Conservative Press had
searched out the inflammatory speeches of the war lords and the
junker politicians. It had seemed to the man in the street a
controversy as remote from the actual interests of his own life--as
remote from the suburban garden in which he grew his roses or from
the golf links on which he spent his Saturday afternoons as a
discussion on the canals of Mars. Now and again, in moments of
political excitement, he had taken sides and adopted newspaper
phrases as his own, declaring with an enormous gravity which he did
not really feel that "The German Fleet was a deliberate menace to our
naval supremacy," or joining in the chorus of "We want eight and we
won't wait," or expressing his utter contempt for "all this militarism,"
and his belief in the "international solidarity" of the new democracy.
But there never entered his inmost convictions that the day might
come during his own lifetime when he--a citizen of Suburbia--might
have to fight for his own hearthside and suffer the intolerable horrors
of war while the roses in his garden were trampled down in mud and
blood, and while his own house came clattering down like a pack of
cards--the family photographs, the children's toys, the piano which he
had bought on the hire system, all the household gods which he
worshipped, mixed up in a heap of ruin--as afterwards at
Scarborough and Hartlepool, Ipswich, and Southend.

If such a thing were possible, why had the nation been duped by its
Government? Why had we been lulled into a false sense of security
without a plain statement of facts which would have taught us to
prepare for the great ordeal? The Government ought to have known
and told the truth. If this war came the manhood of the nation would
be unready and untrained. We should have to scramble an army
together, when perhaps it would be too late.

The middle classes of England tried to comfort themselves even at
the eleventh hour by incredulity.

"Impossible!" they cried. "The thing is unbelievable. It is only a
newspaper scare!"

But as the hours passed the shadow of war crept closer, and touched
the soul of Europe.


5


In Fleet Street, which is connected with the wires of the world, there
was a feverish activity. Walls and tables were placarded with maps.
Photographs, gazetteers, time tables, cablegrams littered the rooms
of editors and news editors. There was a procession of literary
adventurers up the steps of those buildings in the Street of
Adventure--all those men who get lost somewhere between one war
and another and come out with claims of ancient service on the
battlefields of Europe when the smell of blood is scented from afar;
and scores of new men of sporting instincts and jaunty confidence,
eager to be "in the middle of things," willing to go out on any terms so
long as they could see "a bit of fun," ready to take all risks. Special
correspondents, press photographers, the youngest reporters on the
staff, sub-editors emerging from little dark rooms with a new
excitement in eyes that had grown tired with proof correcting, passed
each other on the stairs and asked for their Chance. It was a chance
of seeing the greatest drama in life with real properties, real corpses,
real blood, real horrors with a devilish thrill in them. It was not to be
missed by any self-respecting journalist to whom all life is a stage
play which he describes and criticises from a free seat in the front of
the house.

Yet in those newspaper offices in Fleet Street there was no real
certainty. Even the foreign editors who are supposed to have an
inside knowledge of international politics were not definite in their
assertions. Interminable discussions took place over their maps and
cablegrams. "War is certain." "There will be no war as far as England
is concerned." "Sir Edward Grey will arrange an international
conference." "Germany is bluffing. She will climb down at the
eleventh hour. How can she risk a war with France, Russia, and
England?" "England will stand out." "But our honour? What about our
understanding with France?"

There was a profound ignorance at the back of all these opinions,
assertions, discussions. Fleet Street, in spite of the dogmatism of its
leading articles, did not know the truth and had never searched for it
with a sincerity which would lead now to a certain conviction. All its
thousands of articles on the subject of our relations with Germany
had been but a clash of individual opinions coloured by the traditional
policy of each paper, by the prejudice of the writers and by the
influence of party interests. The brain of Fleet Street was but a more
intense and a more vibrant counterpart of the national psychology,
which in these hours of enormous crisis was bewildered by doubt
and, in spite of all its activity, incredulous of the tremendous
possibility that in a few days England might be engaged in the
greatest war since the Napoleonic era, fighting for her life.


6


On my own lips there was the same incredulity when I said good-bye.
It was on July 29, and England had not yet picked up the gauntlet
which Germany had flung into the face of European peace.

"I shall be back in a few days. Armageddon is still a long way off. The
idea of it is too ridiculous and too damnable!"

I lay awake on the night before I left England with the credentials of a
war correspondent on a roving commission, and there came into my
head a vision of the hideous thing which was being hatched in the
council chambers of Europe, even as the little clock ticked on my
bedroom mantelpiece. I thrust back this vision of blood by old
arguments, old phrases which had become the rag-tags of political
writers.

War with Germany? A war in which half the nations of Europe would
be flung against each other in a deadly struggle--millions against
millions of men belonging to the peoples of the highest civilization?
No, it was inconceivable and impossible. Why should England make
war upon Germany or Germany upon England? We were alike in
blood and character, bound to each other by a thousand ties of
tradition and knowledge and trade and friendship. All the best intellect
of Germany was friendly to us.


7


In Hamburg two years ago I had listened to speeches about all that,
obviously sincere, emotional in their protestations of racial
comradeship. That young poet who had become my friend, who had
taken me home to his house in the country and whose beautiful wife
had plucked roses for me in her garden, and said in her pretty
English, "I send my best love with them to England"--was he a liar
when he spoke fine and stirring words about the German admiration
for English literature and life, and when--it was late in the evening and
we had drunk some wine--he passed his arm through mine and said,
"If ever there were to be a war between our two countries I and all my
friends in Hamburg would weep at the crime and the tragedy."

On that trip to Hamburg we were banqueted like kings, we English
journalists, and the tables were garlanded with flowers in our honour,
and a thousand compliments were paid to us with the friendliest
courtesy. Were they all liars, these smiling Germans who had clinked
glasses with us?

Only a few weeks before this black shadow of war had loomed up
with its deadly menace a great party of German editors had returned
our visit and once again I had listened to speeches about the blood-
brotherhood of the two nations, a little bored by the stale phrases, but
glad to sit between these friendly Germans whom I had met in their
own country. We clinked glasses again, sang "God Save the King"
and the "Wacht am Rhein," compared the character of German and
English literature, of German and English women, clasped hands,
and said, "Auf wiedersehen!" Were we all liars in that room, and did
any of the men there know that when words of friendship were on
their lips there was hatred in their hearts and in each country a
stealthy preparation for great massacres of men? Did any of, those
German editors hear afar off the thunderstrokes of the Krupp guns
which even then were being tested for the war with France and
England? I believe now that some of them must have known.


8


Perhaps I ought to have known, too, remembering the tour which I
had made in Germany two years before.

It was after the Agadir incident, and I had been sent to Germany by
my newspaper on a dovelike mission of peace, to gather sentiments
of good will to England from prominent public men who might desire
out of their intellectual friendship to us to pour oil on the troubled
waters which had been profoundly stirred by our challenge to
Germany's foreign policy. I had a sheaf of introductions, which I
presented in Berlin and Leipzig, Frankfort and Dusseldorf, and other
German towns.

The first man to whom I addressed myself with amiable intent was a
distinguished democrat who knew half the members of the House of
Commons and could slap Liberal politicians on the back with more
familiarity than I should dare to show. He had spent both time and
trouble in organizing friendly visits between the working men and
municipalities of both countries. But he was a little restrained and
awkward in his manners when I handed him my letter of introduction.
Presently he left the room for a few minutes and I saw on his desk a
German newspaper with a leading article signed by his name. I read it
and was amazed to find that it was a violent attack upon England,
demanding unforgetfulness and unforgiveness of the affront which we
had put upon Germany in the Morocco crisis. When the man came
back I ventured to question him about this article, and he declared
that his old friendship for England had undergone a change. He could
give me no expression of good will.

I could get no expression of good will from any public man in
Germany. I remember an angry interview with an ecclesiastic in
Berlin, a personal friend of the Kaiser, though for many years an
ardent admirer of England.

He paced up and down the room with noiseless footsteps on a soft
carpet.

"It is no time for bland words!" he said. "England has insulted us.
Such acts are not to be tolerated by a great nation like ours. There is
only one answer to them, and it is the answer of the sword!"

I ventured to speak of Christian influences which should hold men
back from the brutality of war.

"Surely the Church must always preach the gospel of peace?
Otherwise it is false to the spirit of Christ."

He believed that I intended to insult him, and in a little while he rang
the bell for my dismissal.

Even Edward Bernstein, the great leader of the Social Democrats,
could give me no consoling words for my paper.

"The spirit of nationality," he said--and I have a note of his words--"is
stronger than abstract ideals. Let England make no mistake. If war
were declared to-morrow the Social Democrats would march as one
man in defence of the Fatherland. . . . And you must admit that
England, or rather the English Foreign Office, has put rather a severe
strain upon our pride and patience!"

My mission was a failure. I came back without any expressions of
good will from public men and with an uneasy sense of dangerous
fires smouldering beneath the political life of Germany--fires of hate
not easily quenched by friendly or sentimental articles in the English
Liberal Press. And yet among the ordinary people in railway trains
and restaurants, beer-halls and hotels, I had found no hostility to me
as an Englishman. Rather they had gone out of their way to be
friendly. Some of the university students of Leipzig had taken me to a
public dance, expressed their admiration for English sports, and
asked my opinion about the merits of various English boxers of whom
I had to confess great ignorance. They were good friendly fellows and
I liked them. In various towns of Germany I found myself admiring the
cheerful, bustling gemutlichkeit of the people, the splendid
organization of their civic life, their industry and national spirit.
Walking among them sometimes, I used to ponder over the
possibility of that unvermeidliche krieg--that "unavoidable war"
which was being discussed in all the newspapers. Did these
people want war with England or with anyone? The laughter of the
clerks and shop-girls swarming down the Friedrichstrasse, the
peaceful enjoyment of the middle-class crowds of husbands and
wives, lovers and sweethearts, steaming in the heat of brilliantly lighted
beer-halls seemed to make my question preposterous. The spirit of
the German people was essentially peaceful and democratic. Surely
the weight of all this middle-class common sense would save them
from any criminal adventures proposed by a military caste rattling its
sabre on state occasions? So I came back with a conflict of ideas....



9



A little bald-headed man came into London about two years ago, and
his arrival was noted in a newspaper paragraph. It appeared that he
was a great statistician. He had been appointed by the Governments
of Canada and the United States jointly to prepare a "statistical
survey of Europe," whatever that may mean. I was sent down to call
upon him somewhere in the Temple, and I was to get him to talk
about his statistics.

But after my introduction he shut the door carefully and, with an air of
anxious inquiry through his gold-rimmed spectacles, asked a strange
question:

"Are you an honest young man and a good patriot?"

I could produce no credentials for honesty or patriotism, but hoped
that I might not fail in either.

"I suppose you have come to talk to me about my statistics," he said.

I admitted that this was my mission.

"They are unimportant," he said, "compared with what I have to tell
you. I am going to talk to you about Germany. The English people
ought to know what I have learnt during a year's experience in that
country, where I have lived all the time in the company of public
officials. Sir, it seems to me that the English people do not know that
the entire genius of intellectual Germany is directed to a war against
England. It dominates their thoughts and dreams, and the whole
activity of their national intelligence."

For an hour the little bald-headed man spoke to me of all he had
heard and learnt of Germany's enmity to England during twelve
months in official circles. He desired to give this information to an
English newspaper of standing and authority. He thought the English
people had a right to know.

I went back to my office more disturbed than I cared to admit even to
myself. There had been a kind of terror in the voice of the little man
who had found time for other interests besides his "statistical survey
of Europe." It seemed that he believed himself in the possession of
an enormous and terrible secret threatening the destiny of our
Empire. Yet nobody would believe him when he told it, however
fervently. My editor would not believe him, and none of his words
were published, in my paper or any other. But sometimes I used to
remember him and wonder whether perhaps in all such warnings that
came to us there were not a horrible truth which one day, when
brutally revealed, would make a mockery of all those men in England
who pooh-poohed the peril, and of the idealists who believed that
friendly relations with Germany could be secured by friendly words.
Meanwhile the Foreign Office did not reveal its secrets or give any
clear guidance to the people as to perils or policy--to the people who
would pay in blood for ignorance.


10


When I stood on the deck of the Channel boat in Dover Harbour
looking back on England, whose white cliffs gleamed faintly through
the darkness, a sense of tragic certainty came to me that a summons
of war would come to England, asking for her manhood. Perhaps it
would come to-night. The second mate of the boat came to the side
of the steamer and stared across the inky waters, on which there
were shifting pathways of white radiance, as the searchlights of
distant warships swept the sea.

"God!" he said, in a low voice.

"Do you think it will come to-night?" I asked, in the same tone of
voice. We spoke as though our words were dangerous.

"It's likely. The German fleet won't wait for any declaration, I should
say, if they thought they could catch us napping. But they won't. I
fancy we're ready for them--here, anyhow!"

He jerked his thumb at some dark masses looming through the
darkness in the harbour, caught here and there by a glint of metal
reflected in the water. They were cruisers and submarines nosing
towards the harbour mouth.

"There's a crowd of 'em!" said the second mate, "and they stretch
across the Channel. . . . The Reserve men have been called out--
taken off the trams in Dover to-night. But the public has not yet woken
up to the meaning of it."

He stared out to sea again, and it was some minutes before he spoke
again.

"Queer, isn't it? They'll all sleep in their beds to-night as though
nothing out of the way were happening. And yet, in a few hours,
maybe, there'll be Hell! That's what it's going to be--Hell and
damnation, if I know anything about war!"

"What's that?" I asked, pointing to the harbour bar.

From each side of the harbour two searchlights made a straight beam
of light, and in the glare of it there passed along the surface of the
sea, as it seemed, a golden serpent with shining scales.

"Sea-gulls," said the mate. "Scared, I expect, by all these lights. They
know something's in the wind. Perhaps they can smell--blood!"

He spoke with a laugh, but it had a strange sound.


11


In the saloon were about a dozen men, drinking at the bar. They were
noisy and had already drunk too much. By their accent it was easy to
guess that they came from Manchester, and by their knapsacks,
which contained all their baggage, it was obvious that they were on a
short trip to Paris. A man from Cook's promised them a "good time!"
There were plenty of pretty girls in Paris. They slapped him on the
back and called him "old chap!"

A quiet gentleman seated opposite to me on a leather lounge--I met
him afterwards at the British Embassy in Paris--caught my eye and
smiled.

"They don't seem to worry about the international situation. Perhaps it
will be easier to get to Paris than to get back again!"

"And now drinks all round, lads!" said one of the trippers.

On deck there were voices singing. It was the hymn of the
Marseillaise. I went up towards the sound and found a party of young
Frenchmen standing aft, waving farewells to England, as the syren
hooted, above a rattle of chains and the crash of the gangway which
dropped to the quayside. They had been called back to their country
to defend its soil and, unlike the Englishmen drinking themselves
fuddled, were intoxicated by a patriotic excitement.

"Vive l'Angleterre!"

An answer came back from the quayside:

"Vive la France!"

It was to this shout that we warped away from the jetty and made for
the open sea. A yacht with white sails all agleam as it crossed the bar
of a searchlight so that it seemed like a fairy ship in the vision of a
dream, crept into the harbour and then fluttered into the darkness
below the Admiralty pier.

"That's a queer kind of craft to meet to-night!" I said to the second
mate. "What is she doing?"

"I'd like to know. She's got a German skipper and crew. Spies all of
them, I guess. But nobody seems to bother."

There were spies watching our own boat as we went across the
Channel, but they were on English vessels. Searchlights from many
warships turned their rays upon us, staring at us from stem to stern,
following us with a far-flung vigilance, transmuting the base metal of
our funnel and brasswork into shining silver and burnished gold. As I
stared back into the blinding rays I felt that the eyes of the warships
could look into my very soul, and I walked to the other side of the boat
as though abashed by this scrutiny. I looked back to the shore, with
its winking lights and looming cliffs, and wished I could see by some
kind of searchlight into the soul of England on this night of fate.
Beyond the cliffs of Dover, in the profound darkness of the night,
England seemed asleep. Did not her people hear the beating of
Death's war drums across the fields of Europe, growing louder and
louder, so that on a cross-Channel boat I heard it booming in my
ears, louder than the wind?




Chapter II
Mobilization



1


The thunderbolt came out of a blue sky and in the midst of a brilliant
sunshine which gleamed blindingly above the white houses of Paris
and flung back shadows from the poplars across the long straight
roads between the fields of France. The children were playing as
usual in the gardens of the Tuileries, and their white-capped nurses
were sewing and chatting in the shade of the scorched trees. The old
bird man was still calling "Viens! Viens!" to the sparrows who came to
perch on his shoulders and peck at the bread between his lips, and
Punch was still performing his antique drama in the Petit Guignol to
laughing audiences of boys and girls. The bateaux mouches on the
Seine were carrying heavy loads of pleasure-seekers to Sèvres and
other riverside haunts. In the Pavilion Bleu at St. Cloud elegant little
ladies of the demi-monde sipped rose-tinted ices and said for a
thousand times; "Ciel, comme il fait chaud!" and slapped the hands of
beaky-nosed young men with white slips beneath their waistcoats
and shiny boots and other symbols of a high civilization. Americans in
Panama hats sauntered down the Rue de Rivoli, staring in the shop
windows at the latest studies of nude women, and at night went in
pursuit of adventure to Montmartre, where the orchestras at the Bal
Tabarin were still fiddling mad tangoes in a competition of shrieking
melody and where troops of painted ladies in the Folies Bergères still
paraded in the promenoir with languorous eyes, through wafts of
sickly scent. The little tables were all along the pavements of the
boulevards and the terrasses were crowded with all those bourgeois
Frenchmen and their women who do not move out of Paris even in
the dogdays, but prefer the scenery of their familiar streets to that of
Dieppe and Le Touquet. It was the same old Paris--crowded with
Cook's tourists and full of the melody of life as it is played by the hoot
of motor horns, the clang of steam trams, the shrill-voiced camelots
shouting "La Presse! La Presse!" and of the light laughter of women.

Then suddenly the thunderbolt fell with its signal of war, and in a few
days Paris was changed as though by some wizard's spell. Most of
the children vanished from the Tuileries gardens with their white-
capped nurses, and the sparrows searched in vain for their bird man.
Punch gave a final squawk of dismay and disappeared when the
theatre of the Petit Guignol was packed up to make way for a more
tragic drama. A hush fell upon Montmartre, and the musicians in its
orchestras packed up their instruments and scurried with scared
faces--to Berlin, Vienna, and Budapesth. No more boats went up to
Sèvres and St. Cloud with crowds of pleasure-seekers. The Seine
was very quiet beneath its bridges, and in the Pavilion Bleu no dainty
creatures sat sipping rose-tinted ices or slapped the hands of the
beaky-nosed boys who used to pay for them. The women were hiding
in their rooms, asking God--even before the war they used to ask
God funny questions--how they were going to live now that their
lovers had gone away to fight, leaving them with nothing but the
memory of a last kiss wet with tears. It was not enough to live on for
many days.


2


During the last days of July and the first days of August Paris was
stunned by the shock of this menace, which was approaching swiftly
and terribly. War! But why? Why, in the name of God, should France
be forced into a war for which she was not prepared, for which she
had no desire, because Austria had issued an ultimatum to Servia,
demanding the punishment of a nation of cut-throats for the murder of
an unnecessary Archduke? Germany was behind the business,
Germany was forcing the pace, exasperating Russia, presenting a
grim face to France and rattling the sword in its scabbard so that it
resounded through Europe. Well, let her rattle, so long as France
could keep out of the whole affair and preserve that peace in which
she had built up prosperity since the nightmare of 1870!

L'année terrible! There were many people in France who
remembered that tragic year, and now, after forty-four years, the
memory came back, and they shuddered. They had seen the horrors
of war and knew the meaning of it--its waste of life, its sacrifice of
splendid young manhood, its wanton cruelties, its torture of women,
its misery and destruction. France had been brought to her knees
then and had suffered the last humiliations which may be inflicted
upon a proud nation. But she had recovered miraculously, and
gradually even her desire for revenge, the passionate hope that one
day she might take vengeance for all those indignities and cruelties,
had cooled down and died. Not even for vengeance was war worth
while. Not even to recover the lost provinces was it worth the lives of
all those thousands of young men who must give their blood as the
price of victory. Alsace and Lorraine were only romantic memories,
kept alive by a few idealists and hotheads, who once a year went to
the statue in the Place de la Concorde and deposited wreaths and
made enthusiastic speeches which rang false, and pledged their
allegiance to the lost provinces--"Quand même!" There was a good
deal of blague in these annual ceremonies, laughed at by Frenchmen
of common sense. Alsace and Lorraine had been Germanized. A
Frenchman would find few people there to speak his own tongue. The
old ties of sentiment had worn very thin, and there was not a party in
France who would have dared to advocate a war with Germany for
the sake of this territory. Such a policy would have been a crime
against France itself, who had abandoned the spirit of vengeance,
and had only one ambition--to pursue its ideals and its business in
peace.


3


There was no wild outbreak of Jingo fever, no demonstrations of
blood-lust against Germany in Paris or any town of France, on that
first day of August, when the people waited for the fateful decision
which, if it were for war, would call every able-bodied man to the
colours and arrest all the activities of a nation's normal life, and
demand a dreadful sacrifice in blood and tears. There was only a
sense of stupefaction which seemed to numb the intelligence of men
so that they could not reason with any show of logic, or speak of this
menace without incoherence, but thrust back the awful possibility with
one word, uttered passionately and repeated a thousand times a day:
"Incroyable!"

This word was dinned in my ears. I caught the sound of it as I walked
along the boulevards. It would come like a refrain at the end of
sentences spoken by little groups of men and women sitting outside
the cafés and reading every issue of those innumerable newspapers
which flung out editions at every hour. It was the answer I had from
men of whom I tried to get a clue to the secret movements of
diplomacy, and an answer to that question of war or peace. "C'est
incroyable!" They found it hard to believe--they would not believe--
that without any provocation from France, without any challenge,
Germany would deliberately, force this war upon the Triple Entente
and make a bloody shambles of European civilization. Beneath this
incredulity, this stupefaction, there was among most of the
Frenchmen whom I personally encountered a secret dread that
France was unready for the great ordeal of war and that its outbreak
would find her divided by political parties, inefficient in organization,
corrupt in some of her Government departments. The Socialists and
Syndicalists who had fought against the three years' service might
refuse to march. Only a few months before a deputy had hinted at
grave scandals in the provisioning and equipment of the army.

The history of 1870, with its awful revelations of disorganization and
unreadiness was remembered now and lay heavy upon the hearts of
those educated Frenchmen who, standing outside the political arena,
distrust all politicians, having but little faith in their honesty or
their ability. Who could tell whether France--the new France she
had been called--would rise above her old weaknesses and
confront the peril of this war with a strong, pure, and undivided spirit?


5


On August 1 there was a run on one of the banks. I passed its doors
and saw them besieged by thousands of middle-class men and
women drawn up in a long queue waiting very quietly--with a strange
quietude for any crowd in Paris--to withdraw the savings of a lifetime
or the capital of their business houses. There were similar crowds
outside other banks, and on the faces of these people there was a
look of brooding fear, as though all that they had fought and struggled
for, the reward of all their petty economies and meannesses, and
shifts and tricks, and denials of self-indulgences and starvings of soul
might be suddenly snatched from them and leave them beggared. A
shudder went through one such crowd when a young man came to
speak to them from the steps of the bank. It was a kind of shuddering
sigh, followed by loud murmurings, and here and there angry
protests. The cashiers had been withdrawn from their desks and
cheques could not be paid.

"We are ruined already!" said a woman. "This war will take all our
money! Oh, my God!"

She made her way through the crowd with a fixed white face and
burning eyes.


6


It was strange how in a day all gold disappeared from Paris. I could
not see the glint of it anywhere, unless I drew it from my own purse.
Even silver was very scarce and everybody was trying to cash notes,
which were refused by the shopkeepers. When I put one of them
down on a table at the Café Tourtel the waiter shook his head and
said, "La petite monnaie, s'il vous plaît!" At another place where I put
down a gold piece the waiter seized it as though it were a rare and
wonderful thing, and then gave me all my change in paper, made up
of new five franc notes issued by the Government. In the evening an
official notice was posted on the walls prohibiting the export of grain
and flour. People stared at it and said, "That means war!" Another
sign of coming events, more impressive to the imagination of the
Parisian, was the sudden dwindling in size of the evening
newspapers. They were reduced to two sheets, and in some cases to
a single broadside, owing to the possibility of a famine in paper if war
broke out and cut off the supplies of Paris while the railways were
being used for the mobilization of troops.


7


The city was very quiet and outwardly as calm as on any day in
August. But beneath this normal appearance of things there was a
growing anxiety and people's nerves were so on edge that any
sudden sound would make a man start on his chair on the terrasse
outside the café restaurant. Paris was afraid of itself. What uproar or
riot or criminal demonstration might not burst suddenly into this
tranquillity? There were evil elements lurking in the low quarters.
Apaches and anarchists might be inflamed with the madness of blood
which excites men in time of war. The socialists and syndicalists
might refuse to fight, and fight in maintaining their refusal. Some
political crime might set all those smouldering passions on fire and
make a hell in the streets. So people waited and watched the crowds
and listened to the pulse-beat of Paris.

The sharp staccato of revolver shots heard in the rue Montmartre on
the night of July 31 caused a shudder to pass through the city, as
though they were the signal for a criminal plot which might destroy
France by dividing it while the enemy was on the frontier.

I did not hear those shots but only the newspaper reports which
followed them almost as loudly in the soul of Paris. And yet it was only
the accidental meeting of a friend which diverted my attention of
dining in the Croissant Restaurant in which the crime took place at
the very hour when I should have been there. Some years before in
Paris, when France was in the throes of a railway strike which
developed almost to the verge of revolution, I had often gone to the
Croissant at two, three or four in the morning, because it had police
privileges to keep open all night for the comfort of journalists. Other
night birds had found this roost--ladies who sleep by day, and some
of the queer adventurers of the city which never goes to bed. One
night I had come into the midst of a strange company--the inner circle
of Parisian anarchists who were celebrating a victory over French
law. Their white faces had eyes like live coals. They thrust long thin
fingers through shaggy hair and spoke passionate orations nose to
nose. Their sluttish women shrieked with mirth and gave their kisses
to the leader of the gang, who had the face of Christ as painted by
Ary Scheffer.

It was in this interesting place, on the very velvet cushions where I
used to sit to watch the company, that Jaurès was killed on the eve of
the war. The veteran orator of French socialism, the man who could
stir the passions of the mob--as I had seen more than once--so that
at his bidding they would declare war against all the powers of
Government, was struck down as he sat with his back to an open
window divided from the street by a thin curtain. The young assassin
--a patriot he called himself--had been excited to an hysteria of hate
for a man who had tried to weaken the military power of France by
opposing the measure for a three years' service. It was the madness
of war which had touched his brain, and although Jaurès had called
upon the Socialists of France to march as one man in defence of "La
Patrie," this young neurasthenic made him the first victim of that
enormous sacrifice of blood which has since reeked up to God.
Jaurès, an honest man, perhaps, in spite of all his theatrical appeals
to mob passion--honest at least in his desire to make life more
tolerable for the sweated workers of France--was mortally wounded
by those shots through the window blind, and the crimson cushions of
his seat were dyed with deeper stains.


8


For twenty-four hours France was scared by the murder. It seemed
possible that the crime might let loose a tide of passion among the
followers of the Socialist leader. Placards were hastily posted on the
walls by the military governor of Paris professing abhorrence of the
assassination of a great Frenchman, promising a just punishment of
the crime, and calling upon the people to remain calm in this great
national crisis which would decide the destiny of France.

The appeal was not challenged. By a strange irony of fate the death
of Jaurès strengthened the Government which he bad attacked
throughout his life, and the dead body of the man of strife became, on
its way to the grave, the symbol of a united France, of obedience to
its laws, and of a martial fervour which in the old days of rebellion he
had ridiculed and denounced. On a gusty day I saw the Red Flag of
revolutionary socialism fluttering across the Place de la Concorde in
front of the coffin containing the corpse of its leader. Blood red, flag
after flag streamed past, all aglow in the brilliant sunshine, and behind
walked the representatives of every party in the State, including all
those who had denounced Jaurès in life as a traitor, a revolutionist,
and the most evil influence in France. For the first time in history the
aristocrats and the monarchists, the Conservative Republicans and
the Clericals walked in procession behind the blood-red rag.


9


Part of the active army of France was already on the frontiers. Before
the first whisper of war had reached the ears of the people, large
bodies of troops had been sent to the frontier towns to strengthen the
already existing garrisons. But the main army of the nation was
pursuing the ordinary pursuits of civil life. To resist the might of
Germany, the greatest military Power in Europe, already approaching
the frontiers in vast masses of men and machines, France would
have to call out all her manhood which had been trained in military
service.


Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!


The call to arms came without any loud clamour of bugles or orations.
Unlike the scenes in the early days of 1870, there were no street
processions of civil enthusiasts. No painted beauty of the stage
waved the tricolour to the shout of "À Berlin!" No mob orators jumped
upon the café tables to wave their arms in defiance of the foe and to
prophesy swift victories.

The quietness of Paris was astounding, and the first mobilization
orders were issued with no more publicity than attends the delivery of
a trade circular through the halfpenny post. Yet in hundreds of
thousands of houses through France and in all the blocks and
tenements of Paris there was a drama of tragic quietude when the
cards were delivered to young men in civilian clothes, men who sat at
table with old mothers or young wives, or in lowly rooms with some
dream to keep them company, or with little women who had spoilt the
dream, or fostered it, or with comrades who had gone on great
adventures with them between the Quartier Latin and the Mountain of
Montmartre. "It has come!"


10


Fate had come with that little card summoning each man to join his
depot, and tapped him on the shoulder with just a finger touch. It was
no more than that--a touch on the shoulder. Yet I know that for many
of those young men it seemed a blow between the eyes, and, to
some of them, a strangle-grip as icy cold as though Death's fingers
were already closing round their throats.

I seem to hear the silence in those rooms when for a moment or two
young men stared at the cards and the formal words on them, and
when, for just that time, all that life and death, means, came before
their souls. Was this the summons, Death itself? Somewhere on the
German side was a little steel bullet or a bit of shell waiting for the
Frenchman to whom it was destined. How long would it have to wait
to find its billet? Perhaps only a day or two--a question of hours,
slipping away now towards eternity as the clock ticked on. From the
old mother, or the young wife, from the little woman whose emotions
and quarrels, greediness or self-denial, had seemed all that mattered
in life, all that life meant to a young man of twenty-five or so, there
came perhaps a cry, a name spoken with grief, or no word at all but
the inarticulate expression of foreboding, terror, and a woman's
anguish.

"Jean! Mon petit! O, mon pauvre petit!" "C'est pour la patrie... mon
devoir... je reviendrai bientôt... Courage, ma femme!"

Courage! How many million times was the word spoken that night of
mobilization by women who saw the sudden pallor of their men, by
men who heard the cry of their women? I heard it in the streets,
spoken quite brutally sometimes, by men afraid of breaking down,
and with a passionate tenderness by other men, sure of their own
strength but pitiful for those whose spirit fainted at the spectre of
death which stood quite close.


11


In the days that followed the Second of August I saw the whole
meaning of mobilization in France--the call of a nation to arms--from
Paris to the Eastern frontier, and the drama of it all stirs me now as I
write, though many months have passed since then and I have seen
more awful things on the harvest fields of death. More awful, but not
more pitiful. For even in the sunshine of that August, before blood
had been spilt and the brooding spectre of war had settled drearily
over Europe, there was a poignant tragedy beneath the gallantry and
the beauty of that squadron of cavalry that I had seen riding out of
their barrack gates to entrain for the front. The men and the horses
were superb--clean-limbed, finely trained, exquisite in their pride of
life. As they came out into the streets of Paris the men put on the little
touch of swagger which belongs to the Frenchman when the public
gaze is on him. Even the horses tossed their heads and seemed to
realize the homage of the populace. Hundreds of women were in the
crowd, waving handkerchiefs, springing forward out of their line to
throw bunches of flowers to those cavaliers, who caught them and
fastened them to képi and jacket. The officers--young dandies of the
Chasseurs--carried great bouquets already and kissed the petals in
homage to all the womanhood of France whose love they symbolized.
There were no tears in that crowd, though the wives and sweethearts
of many of the young men must have stood on the kerbstone to
watch them pass.

At those moments, in the sunshine, even the sting of parting was
forgotten in the enthusiasm and pride which rose up to those splendid
ranks of cavalry who were on their way to fight foi France and to
uphold the story of their old traditions. I could see no tears then but
my own, for I confess that suddenly to my eyes there came a mist of
tears and I was seized with an emotion that made me shudder icily in
the glare of the day. For beyond the pageantry of the cavalcade I saw
the fields of war, with many of those men and horses lying mangled
under the hot sun of August. I smelt the stench of blood, for I had
been in the muck and misery of war before and had seen the death
carts coming back from the battlefield and the convoys of wounded
crawling down the rutty roads--from Adrianople--with men, who had
been strong and fine, now shattered, twisted and made hideous by
pain. The flowers carried by those cavalry officers seemed to me like
funeral wreaths upon men who were doomed to die, and the women
who sprang out of the crowds with posies for their men were offering
the garlands of death.


12


In the streets of Paris in those first days of the war I saw many
scenes of farewell. All day long one saw them, so that at last one
watched them without emotion, because the pathos of them became
monotonous. It was curious how men said good-bye, often, to their
wives and children and comrades at a street corner, or in the middle
of the boulevards. A hundred times or more I saw one of these
conscript soldiers who had put on his uniform again after years of
civilian life, turn suddenly to the woman trudging by his side or to a
group of people standing round him and say: "Alors, il faut dire Adieu
et Au revoir!" One might imagine that he was going on a week-end
visit and would be back again in Paris on Monday next. It was only by
the long-drawn kiss upon the lips of the woman who raised a dead
white face to him and by the abruptness with which the man broke
away and walked off hurriedly until he was lost in the passing crowds
that one might know that this was as likely as not the last parting
between a man and a woman who had known love together and that
each of them had seen the vision of death which would divide them
on this side of the grave. The stoicism of the Frenchwomen was
wonderful. They made no moan or plaint. They gave their men to "La
Patrie" with the resignation of religious women who offer their hearts
to God. Some spiritual fervour, which in France permeates the
sentiment of patriotism, giving a beauty to that tradition of nationality
which, without such a spirit, is the low and ignorant hatred of other
peoples, strengthened and uplifted them.


13


Sometimes when I watched these scenes I raged against the villainy
of a civilization which still permits these people to be sent like sheep
to the slaughter. Great God! These poor wretches of the working
quarters in Paris, these young peasants from the fields, these
underpaid clerks from city offices had had no voice in the declaration
of war. What could they know about international politics? Why
should they be the pawns of the political chessboard, played without
any regard for human life by diplomats and war lords and high
financiers? These poor weedy little men with the sallow faces of the
clerical class, in uniforms which hung loose round their undeveloped
frames, why should they be caught in the trap of this horrible machine
called "War" and let loose like a lot of mice against the hounds of
death? These peasants with slouching shoulders and loose limbs and
clumsy feet, who had been bringing in the harvest of France, after
their tilling and sowing and reaping, why should they be marched off
into tempests of shells which would hack off their strong arms and
drench unfertile fields with their blood? They had had to go, leaving all
the things that had given a meaning and purpose to their days, as
though God had commanded them, instead of groups of politicians
among the nations of Europe, damnably careless of human life. How
long will this fetish of international intrigue be tolerated by civilized
democracies which have no hatred against each other, until it is
inflamed by their leaders and then, in war itself, by the old savageries
of primitive nature?


14


I went down to the East frontier on the first day of mobilization. It was
in the evening when I went to take the train from the Gare de l'Est.
The station was filled with a seething crowd of civilians and soldiers,
struggling to get to the booking-offices, vainly seeking information as
to the times of departure to distant towns of France. The railway
officials were bewildered and could give no certain information. The
line was under military control. Many trains had been suppressed and
the others had no fixed time-table. I could only guess at the purpose
animating the individuals in these crowds. Many of them, perhaps,
were provincials, caught in Paris by the declaration of war and
desperately anxious to get back to their homes before the lines were
utterly choked by troop trains. Others belonged to neutral countries
and were trying to escape across the frontier before the gates were
closed. One of the "neutrals" spoke to me--in German, which was a
dangerous tongue in Paris. He was a Swiss who had come to Paris
on business for a few days, leaving his wife in a village near Basle. It
was of his wife that he kept talking.

"Ach, mein armes Weib! Sie hat Angst fur mich."

I pitied this little man in a shoddy suit and limp straw hat who had
tears in his eyes and no courage to make inquiries of station officials
because he spoke no word of French. I asked on his behalf and after
jostling for half an hour in the crowd and speaking to a dozen porters
who shrugged their shoulders and said, "Je n'en sais rien!" came
back with the certain and doleful news that the last train had left that
night for Basle. The little Swiss was standing between his packages
with his back to the wall, searching for me with anxious eyes, and
when I gave him the bad news tears trickled down his face.

"Was kann ich thun? Mein armes Weib hat Angst fur mich."

There was nothing he could do that night, however anxious his poor
wife might be, but I did not have any further conversation with him, for
my bad German had already attracted the notice of the people
standing near, and they were glowering at me suspiciously, as though
I were a spy.


15


It was an hour later that I found a train leaving for Nancy, though
even then I was assured by railway officials that there was no such
train. I had faith, however, in a young French officer who pledged his
word to me that I should get to Nancy if I took my place in the
carriage before which he stood. He was going as far as Toul himself.

I could see by the crimson velvet round his kèpi that he was an army
doctor, and by the look of sadness in his eyes that he was not glad to
leave the beautiful woman by his side who clasped his arm. They
spoke to me in English.

"This war will be horrible!" said the lady. "It is so senseless and so
unnecessary. Why should Germany want to fight us? There has been
no quarrel between us and we wanted to live in peace."

The young officer made a sudden gesture of disgust.

"It is a crime against humanity--a stupid, wanton crime!"

Then he asked a question earnestly and waited for my answer with
obvious anxiety:

"Will England join in?"

I said "Yes!" with an air of absolute conviction, though on that night
England had not yet given her decision. During the last twenty-four
hours I had been asked this question a score of times. The people of
Paris were getting impatient of England's silence. Englishmen in Paris
were getting very anxious. If England did not keep her unwritten
pledge to France, it would be dangerous and a shameful thing to be
an Englishman in Paris. Some of my friends were already beginning
to feel their throats with nervous fingers.

"I think so too!" said the officer, when he heard my answer. "England
will be dishonoured otherwise!"


16


The platform was now thronged with young men, many of them being
officers in a variety of brand-new uniforms, but most of them still in
civilian clothes as they had left their workshops or their homes to
obey the mobilization orders to join their military depots. The young
medical officer who had been speaking to me withdrew himself from
his wife's arm to answer some questions addressed to him by an old
colonel in his own branch of service. The lady turned to me and
spoke in a curiously intimate way, as though we were old friends.

"Have you begun to realize what it means? I feel that I ought to weep
because my husband is leaving me. We have two little children. But
there are no tears higher than my heart. It seems as though he were
just going away for a week-end--and yet he may never come back to
us. Perhaps to-morrow I shall weep."

She did not weep even when the train was signalled to start and
when the man put his arms about her and held her in a long
embrace, whispering down to her. Nor did I see any tears in other
women's eyes as they waved farewell. It was only the pallor of their
faces which showed some hidden agony.


17


Before the train started the carriage in which I had taken my seat was
crowded with young men who, excepting one cavalry officer in the
corner, seemed to belong to the poorest classes of Paris. In the
corner opposite the dragoon was a boy of eighteen or so in the
working clothes of a terrassier or labourer. No one had come to see
him off to the war, and he was stupefied with drink. Several times he
staggered up and vomited out of the window with an awful violence of
nausea, and then fell back with his head lolling sideways on the
cushions of the first-class carriage. None of the other men--except
the cavalry officer, who drew in his legs slightly--took the slightest
interest in this poor wretch--a handsome lad with square-cut features
and fair tousled hair, who had tried to get courage out of absinthe
before leaving for the war.


18


In the corner opposite my own seat was a thin pallid young man, also
a little drunk, but with an excited brain in which a multitude of strange
and tragic thoughts chased each other. He recognized me as an
Englishman at once, and with a shout of "Camarade!" shook hands
with me not once but scores of times during the first part of our
journey.

He entered upon a monologue that seemed interminable, his voice
rising into a shrill excitement and then sinking into a hoarse whisper.
He belonged to the "apache" type, and had come out of one of those
foul lairs which lie hidden behind the white beauty of Paris--yet he
spoke with a terrible eloquence which kept me fascinated. I
remember some of his words, though I cannot give them his white
heat of passion, nor the infinite pathos of his self-pity.

"I have left a wife behind, the woman who loves me and sees
something more in me than vileness. Shall I tell you how I left her,
Monsieur? Dying--in a hospital at Charenton. I shall never see her
again. I shall never again take her thin white face in my dirty hands
and say, 'You and I have tasted the goodness of life, my little one,
while we have starved together!' For life is good, Monsieur, but in a
little while I shall be dead in one place and my woman in another. That
is certain. I left a child behind me--a little girl. What will happen to
her when I am killed? I left her with the concierge, who promised to
take care of her--not for money, you understand, because I had none
to give. My little girl will never see me again, and I shall never see her
grow into a woman. Because I am going to be killed. Perhaps in a
day or two there will be no more life for me. This hand of mine--you
see I can grasp things with it, move it this way and that, shake hands
with you--camarade!--salute the spirit of France with it--comme ça!
But tomorrow or the next day it will be quite still. A dead thing--like my
dead body. It is queer. Here I sit talking to you alive. But to-morrow or
the next day my corpse will lie out on the battlefield, like a bit of
earth. I can see that corpse of mine, with its white face and staring eyes.
Ugh! it is a dirty sight--a man's corpse. Here in my heart something
tells me that I shall be killed quite soon, perhaps at the first shot. But
do you know I shall not be sorry to die. I shall be glad, Monsieur! And
why glad, you ask? Because I love France and hate the Germans
who have put this war on to us. I am going to fight--I, a Socialist and a
syndicalist--so that we shall make an end of war, so that the little ones
of France shall sleep in peace, and the women go without fear. This
war will have to be the last war. It is a war of Justice against
Injustice. When they have finished this time the people will have no
more of it. We who go out to die shall be remembered because we
gave the world peace. That will be our reward, though we shall know
nothing of it but lie rotting in the earth--dead! It is sad that to-morrow,
or the next day, I shall be dead. I see my corpse there-----"

He saw his corpse again, and wept a little at the sight of it.

A neurotic type--a poor weed of life who had been reared in the dark
lairs of civilization. Yet I had no contempt for him as he gibbered with
self-pity. The tragedy of the future of civilization was in the soul of
that pallid, sharp-featured, ill-nourished man who had lived in misery
within the glitter of a rich city and who was now being taken to his
death--I feel sure he died in the trenches even though no bullet may
have reached him--at the command of great powers who knew
nothing of this poor ant. What did his individual life matter? ... I stared
into the soul of a soldier of France and wondered at the things I saw
in it--at the spiritual faith which made a patriot of that apache.


19


There was a change of company in the carriage, the democrats being
turned into a third-class carriage to make way for half a dozen officers
of various grades and branches. I had new types to study and was
surprised by the calmness and quietude of these men--mostly of
middle age--who had just left their homes for active service. They
showed no signs of excitement but chatted about the prospects of the
war as though it were an abstract problem. The attitude of England
was questioned and again I was called upon to speak as the
representative of my country and to assure Frenchmen of our
friendship and co-operation. They seemed satisfied with my
statements and expressed their belief that the British Fleet would
make short work of the enemy at sea.

One of the officers took no part in the conversation. He was a
handsome man of about forty years of age, in the uniform of an
infantry regiment, and he sat in the corner of the carriage, stroking his
brown moustache in a thoughtful way. He had a fine gravity of face
and once or twice when his eyes turned my way I saw an immense
sadness in them.


20


As our train passed through France on its way to Nancy, we heard
and saw the tumult of a nation arming itself for war and pouring down
to its frontiers to meet the enemy. All through the night, as we passed
through towns and villages and under railway bridges, the song of the
Marseillaise rose up to the carriage windows and then wailed away
like a sad plaint as our engine shrieked and raced on. At the sound of
the national hymn one of the officers in my carriage always opened
his eyes and lifted his head, which had been drooping forward on his
chest, and listened with a look of puzzled surprise, as though he
could not realize even yet that France was at war and that he was on
his way to the front. But the other officers slept; and the silent man,
whose quiet dignity and sadness had impressed me, smiled a little in
his sleep now and then and murmured a word or two, among which I
seemed to hear a woman's name.

In the dawn and pallid sunlight of the morning I saw the soldiers of
France assembling. They came across the bridges with glinting rifles,
and the blue coats and red trousers of the infantry made them look in
the distance like tin soldiers from a children's playbox. But there were
battalions of them close to the railway lines, waiting at level crossings,
and with stacked arms on the platforms, so that I could look into their
eyes and watch their faces. They were fine young men, with a certain
hardness and keenness of profile which promised well for France.
There was no shouting among them, no patriotic demonstrations, no
excitability. They stood waiting for their trains in a quiet, patient way,
chatting among themselves, smiling, smoking cigarettes, like soldiers
on their way to sham fights in the ordinary summer manoeuvres. The
town and village folk, who crowded about them and leaned over the
gates at the level crossings to watch our train, were more
demonstrative. They waved hands to us and cried out "Bonne
chance!" and the boys and girls chanted the Marseillaise again in
shrill voices. At every station where we halted, and we never let one
of them go by without a stop, some of the girls came along the
platform with baskets of fruit, of which they made free gifts to our
trainload of men. Sometimes they took payment in kisses, quite
simply and without any bashfulness, lifting their faces to the lips of
bronzed young men who thrust their képis back and leaned out of the
carriage windows.

"Come back safe and sound, my little one," said a girl. "Fight well for
France!"

"I do not hope to come back," said a soldier, "but I shall die fighting."


21


The fields were swept with the golden light of the sun, and the heavy
foliage of the trees sang through every note of green. The white
roads of France stretched away straight between the fields and the
hills, with endless lines of poplars as their sentinels, and in clouds of
greyish dust rising like smoke the regiments marched with a steady
tramp. Gun carriages moved slowly down the roads in a glare of sun
which sparkled upon the steel tubes of the field artillery and made a
silver bar of every wheel-spoke. I heard the creak of the wheels and
the rattle of the limber and the shouts of the drivers to their teams;
and I thrilled a little every time we passed one of these batteries
because I knew that in a day or two these machines, which were
being carried along the highways of France, would be wreathed with
smoke denser than the dust about them now, while they vomited forth
shells at the unseen enemy whose guns would answer with the roar
of death.

Guns and men, horses and wagons, interminable convoys of
munitions, great armies on the march, trainloads of soldiers on all the
branch lines, soldiers bivouacked in the roadways and in market
places, long processions of young civilians carrying bundles to
military depots where they would change their clothes and all their
way of life--these pictures of preparation for war flashed through the
carriage windows into my brain, mile after mile, through the country of
France, until sometimes I closed my eyes to shut out the glare and
glitter of this kaleidoscope, the blood-red colour of all those French
trousers tramping through the dust, the lurid blue of all those soldiers'
overcoats, the sparkle of all those gun-wheels. What does it all mean,
this surging tide of armed men? What would it mean in a day or two,
when another tide of men had swept up against it, with a roar of
conflict, striving to overwhelm this France and to swamp over its
barriers in waves of blood? How senseless it seemed that those mild-
eyed fellows outside my carriage windows, chatting with the girls while
we waited for the signals to fall, should be on their way to kill other
mild-eyed men, who perhaps away in Germany were kissing other
girls, for gifts of fruit and flowers.


22


It was at this station near Toul that I heard the first words of hatred.
They were in a conversation between two French soldiers who had
come with us from Paris. They had heard that some Germans had
already been taken prisoners across the frontier, and they were angry
that the men were still alive.

"Prisoners? Pah! Name of a dog! I will tell you what I would do with
German prisoners!"

It was nothing nice that that man wanted to do with German
prisoners. He indulged in long and elaborate details as to the way in
which he would wreath their bowels about his bayonet and tear out
their organs with his knife. The other man had more imagination. He
devised more ingenious modes of torture so that the Germans should
not die too soon.

I watched the men as they spoke. They had the faces of murderers,
with bloodshot eyes and coarse features, swollen with drink and vice.
There was a life of cruelty in the lines about their mouths, and in their
husky laughter. Their hands twitched and their muscles gave
convulsive jerks, as they worked themselves into a fever of blood-
lust. In the French Revolution it was such men as these who leered
up at the guillotine and laughed when the heads of patrician women
fell into the basket, and who did the bloody Work of the September
massacre. The breed had not died out in France, and war had
brought it forth from its lairs again.


23


These men were not typical of the soldiers of France. In the
headquarters at Nancy, where I was kept waiting for some time in
one of the guard-rooms before being received by the commandant, I
chatted with many of the men and found them fine fellows of a good,
clean, cheery type. When they heard that I was a war correspondent,
they plied me with greetings and questions. "You are an English
journalist? You want to come with us? That is good! Every
Englishman is a comrade and we will give you some fine things to
write about!"

They showed me their rifles and their field kit, asked me to feel the
weight of their knapsacks, and laughed when I said that I should faint
with such a burden. In each black sack the French soldier carried--in
addition to the legendary bâton of a field-marshal--a complete change
of underclothing, a second pair of boots, provisions for two days,
consisting of desiccated soup, chocolate and other groceries, and a
woollen night-cap. Then there were his tin water-bottle, or bidon (filled
with wine at the beginning of the war), his cartridge belt, rifle, military
overcoat strapped about his shoulders, and various other
impedimenta.

"It's not a luxury, this life of ours," said a tall fellow with a fair
moustache belonging to the famous 20th Regiment of the line, which
was the first to enter Nancy after the German occupation of the town
in 1870.

He pointed to the rows of straw beds on which some of his comrades
lay asleep, and to the entire lack of comfort in the whitewashed room.

"Some of you English gentlemen," he said, "would hardly like to lie
down here side by side with the peasants from their farms, smelling of
their barns. But in France it is different. We have aristocrats still, but
some of them have to shake down with the poorest comrades and
know no distinction of rank now that all wear the same old uniform."

It seemed to me a bad uniform for modern warfare--the red trousers
and blue coat and the little képi made famous in many great battle
pictures--but the soldier told me they could not fight with the same
spirit if they wore any other clothes than those which belong to the
glorious traditions of France.


24


When I was taken to Colonel Duchesne, second-in-command to
General Foch, he gave me a smiling greeting, though I was a
trespasser in the war zone, and he wanted to know what I thought of
his "boys," what was my opinion of the mobilization, and what were
my impressions of the way in which France had responded to the call.
I answered with sincerity, and when I spoke of the astonishing way in
which all classes seemed to have united in defence of the nation,
Colonel Duchesne had a sudden mist of tears in his eyes which he
did not try to hide.

"It is sublime! All politics have been banished. We are one people,
with one ideal and one purpose--La France!"

Then he came to the business of my visit--to obtain a permit to march
with the French troops.

"It is very difficult," said the Colonel. "General Foch would do all he
could for you--he loves the English--but no French correspondents
are allowed on the frontier, and we can hardly make a distinction in
your favour. Still, I will put your appeal before the general. The answer
shall be sent to your hotel."


25


It was while waiting for this reply that I was able to explore Nancy and
to see the scenes of mobilization. The town was under martial law. Its
food-supplies were under strict supervision by the commandant.
Every motor-car and cart had been commandeered for the use of the
army, and every able-bodied citizen had been called to the colours. I
was the only guest in the Grand Hotel and the manager and his wife
attended to my wants themselves. They were astounded to see me in
the town.

"You are the only foreigner left," they said, "except those who are
under armed guard, waiting to be taken to the Swiss frontier. Look!
there go the last of them!"

Through the glass windows of the hotel door I saw about two hundred
men marching away from the square surrounded by soldiers with
fixed bayonets. They carried bundles and seemed to droop under the
burden of them already. But I fancy their hearts were heaviest, and I
could see that these young men--waiters and hairdressers and
tradesmen mostly of Swiss nationality--were unwilling victims of this
tragedy of war which had suddenly thrust them out of their business
and smashed their small ambitions and booted them out of a country
which had given them a friendly welcome. On the other side of the
fixed bayonets were some women who wept as they called out
"Adieu!" to their fair-haired fellows. One of them held up a new-born
baby between the guards as she ran alongside, so that its little
wrinkled face touched the cheek of a young man who had a look of
agony in his eyes.

That night I heard the shrill notes of bugle calls and going to my
bedroom window listened to the clatter of horses' hoofs and saw the
dim forms of cavalry and guns going through the darkness--towards
the enemy. No sound of firing rattled my window panes. It still
seemed very quiet--over there to the East. Yet before the dawn came
a German avalanche of men and guns might be sweeping across the
frontier, and if I stayed a day or two in the open town of Nancy I might
see the spiked helmets of the enemy glinting down the streets. The
town was not to be defended, I was told, if the French troops had to
fall back from the frontier to the fortresses of Belfort and Toul.

A woman's voice was singing outside in the courtyard when I
awakened next day. How strange that any woman should sing in an
undefended town confronted by such a peril. But none of the girls
about the streets had any fear in their eyes. German frightfulness had
not yet scared them with its nameless horrors.


28


I did not stay in Nancy. It was only the French War Office in Paris who
could give permission for a correspondent to join the troops. This
unfortified town has never echoed in the war to the tramp of German
feet, and its women's courage has not been dismayed by the worst
horrors. But since those days of August 1914, many women's faces
have blanched at the sight of blood--streams of blood sopping the
stretchers in which the wounded have been carried back from the
frontier, which seemed so quiet when I listened at the open window.
Those soldiers I talked to in the general headquarters--how many of
them are now alive? They were the men who fought in Alsace and
Lorraine, when whole battalions were decimated under a withering
shell-fire beyond the endurance of human courage, and who
marched forward to victories, and backward in retreats, and forward
again over the dead bodies of their comrades and corrupting heaps
of German dead, in an ebb and flow of warfare which made the fields
and the woods one great stench of horror, from which there came
back madmen and maimed creatures, and young men, lucky with
slight wounds, who told the tale of things they had seen as though
they had escaped from hell. I met some of them afterwards and
turned sick and faint as I listened to their stories; and afterwards on
the western side of the French front, three hundred miles from Nancy,
I came upon the dragoons of Belfort who had ridden past me in the
sunshine of those August days. Then they had been very fine to see
in their clean uniforms and on their glossy horses, garlanded with
flowers. At the second meeting they were stained and warworn, and
their horses limped with drooping heads, and they rode as men who
have seen many comrades fall and have been familiar with the ways
of death. They were fine to see again, those dirty, tired, grim-faced
men. But it was a different kind of beauty which sent a queer thrill
through me as I watched them pass.




Chapter III
The Secret War



1


It was the most astounding thing in modern history, the secrecy
behind which great armies were moving and fighting. To a civilization
accustomed to the rapid and detailed accounts of news, there was
something stupefying in the veil of silence which enshrouded the
operations of the legions which were being hurled against each other
along the frontiers. By one swift stroke of the military censorship
journalism was throttled. All its lines of communication were cut,
suddenly, as when, in my office, I spoke from Paris to England, and
found myself with a half-finished sentence before a telephone which
would no longer "march," as they say across the Channel. Pains and
penalties were threatened against any newspaper which should dare
to publish a word of military information beyond the official
communiqués issued in order to hide the truth. Only by a careful
study of maps from day to day and a microscopic reading between
the lines could one grope one's way to any kind of clear fact which
would reveal something more than the vague optimism, the patriotic
fervour, of those early dispatches issued from the Ministry of War.
Now and again a name would creep into these communiqués which
after a glance at the map would give one a cold thrill of anxiety and
doubt. Was it possible that the enemy had reached that point? If so,
then its progress was phenomenal and menacing. But M. le Marquis
de Messimy, War Minister of France, was delightfully cheerful. He
assured the nation day after day that their heroic army was making
rapid progress. He omitted to say in what direction. He gave no
details of these continual victories. He did not publish lists of
casualties. It seemed, at first, as though the war were bloodless.


2


One picture of Paris, in those first days of August, comes to my mind
now. In a great room to the right of the steps of the War Office a
number of men in civilian clothes sit in gilded chairs with a strained
look of expectancy, as though awaiting some message of fate. They
have interesting faces. My fingers itch to make a sketch of them, but
only Steinlen could draw these Parisian types who seem to belong to
some literary or Bohemian coterie. What can they be doing at the
Ministry of War? They smoke cigarettes incessantly, talk in whispers
tête-â-tête, or stare up at the steel casques and cuirasses on the
walls, or at the great glass candelabra above their heads as though
they can only keep their patience in check by gazing fixedly at some
immovable object. Among the gilded chairs and beneath the Empire
mirrors which reflect the light there are three iron bedsteads with
straw mattresses, and now and again a man gets up from one of
these straight-backed chairs and lies at full length on one of the beds.
But a minute later he rises silently again and listens intently,
nervously, to the sound of footsteps coming sharply across the
polished boards. It seems to be the coming of the messenger for
whom all these men have been waiting. They spring to their feet and
crowd round a table as a gentleman comes in with a bundle of papers
from which he gives a sheet to every outstretched hand. The Parisian
journalists have received the latest bulletin of war. They read it
silently, devouring with their eyes those few lines of typewritten words.
Here is the message of fate. Those slips of paper will tell them
whether it goes well or ill with France. One of them speaks to his
neighbour:

"Tout va bien!"

Yes, all goes well, according to the official bulletin, but there is not
much news on that slip of paper, not enough for men greedy for
every scrap of news. Perhaps the next dispatch will contain a longer
story. They must come again, these journalists of France, to smoke
more cigarettes, to stare at the steel armour, to bridle their impatience
with clenched hands. This little scene at the Ministry of War is played
four times a day, and there is a tremendous drama behind the
quietude of those waiting men, whose duty it is to tell France and the
world what another day of war has done for the flag.


3


Another little scene comes to my mind as I grope back to those first
days of war. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the Quai d'Orsay,
there is more quietude. It is difficult to realise that this house has been
the scene of a world-drama within the last few days, and that in one
of its reception-rooms a German gentleman spoke a few quiet words,
before asking for some papers, which hurled millions of men against
each other in a deadly struggle involving all that we mean by
civilization. I went to that house and waited for a while in an ante-
chamber where the third Napoleon once paced up and down before a
war which ended disastrously for France. Presently a footman came
through the velvet curtains and said, "Monsieur le Président vous
attend." I was taken into another room, a little cabinet overlooking a
garden, cool and green under old trees through which the sunlight
filtered. A stone goddess smiled at me through the open windows. I
saw her out of the corner of my eye as I bowed to M. Doumergue,
Minister of Foreign Affairs, and, for a time, Prime Minister of France.
For some reason my imagination was touched by that garden of
peace where a Greek goddess smiled in the green twilight.

But M. Doumergue was smiling, too, with that expression of tout va
bien which masked the anxiety of every statesman who had seen
behind the veil. After a few preliminary words he spoke of the
progress of the war and of its significance to the world.

"Civilization itself," he said, "depends upon the success of our arms.
For years Germany has played the part of a bully, basing her policy
upon brute force, and thrusting her sword before the eyes of men.
She was swollen-headed with her military pride. She preached the
gospel of the swashbuckler. And now, after the declaration of this
war, which was none of our seeking, how are they behaving, these
Germans? Like barbarians. They have treated our Ambassador with
infamous discourtesy. They have behaved with incredible insolence
and boorishness to our Consuls. The barbaric nature of the enemy is
revealed in a way which will never be forgotten. Fortunately, we have
European civilization on our side. All the cultured races sympathize
with us. They know that Europe would be lost if the German Empire,
with its policy of blood and iron, with its military caste and tyranny,
should become more dominant and stride across the frontiers of
civilized States. But of the ultimate issue of this war there can be no
doubt. With Great Britain fighting side by side with France, with
Russia attacking on the Eastern front, what hopes can Germany
nourish now? The war may be a long struggle; it may lead to many
desperate battles; but in the end the enemy must be doomed. Where
is her boasted organization? Already our prisoners tell us that they
were starving when they fought. It seems as though these critics of
French military organization were demoralized at the outset. Ils ont
bluffé tout le temps! I can assure you that we are full of confidence,
and perfectly satisfied with the way in which the war is progressing."


4


This Minister of France was "perfectly satisfied." His optimism
cheered me, though all his words had not told me the things I wanted
to know, nor lifted the corner of that veil which hid the smoke and
flash of guns. But the French had taken prisoners and somewhere or
other masses of men were fighting and dying. ... As I came back from
the Quai d'Orsay and a stroll in the Champs Elysées through the
golden twilight of a splendid day, when the lamps of Paris began to
gleam like stars through the shimmering haze and the soft foliage of
the most beautiful highway in the world, there came a clatter of hoofs
and the music of soldiers' harness. It was a squadron of the Garde
Républicaine riding on the last patrol of the day round the ramparts of
Paris. I watched them gallop through the Arc de Triomphe, their black
crinières streaming backwards like smoke from their helmets. They
rode towards the setting sun, a crimson bar across the blue of the
sky, and when I walked back slowly to the heart of Paris the
boulevards were already quiet, and in the velvety darkness which
overtook me there was peace and order. Only the silence of the
streets told me that France was at war.


6


Obviously it was hopeless to stay in Paris waiting for official
permission to follow the armies as a correspondent and to penetrate
more deeply into the heart of that mystery which was fogged more
deeply by the words that came forth every day from the Ministry of
War. The officials were very polite and took great trouble to soothe
the excited emotions of would-be war correspondents. "In a few days,
gentlemen, if all continues to go well." They desired our photographs,
in duplicate, a medical certificate of health, recommendations as to
our mental and moral qualities, formal applications and informal
interviews. But meanwhile the war was being fought and we were
seeing nothing.

News of great victory came to Paris when the bulletins announced
the advance of French troops in Alsace and the capture of Mulhouse
and Altkirch. Instantly there were joyous scenes in the streets.
Boulevards, which had been strangely quiet, became thronged with
men and women called out from the twilight of their rooms by this
burst of sunlight, as it seemed. The news held the magic thrill of an
Alsace restored to France. ... It was long afterwards that Paris heard
strange and evil rumours of reverses down there, of a regiment which
flung down its rifles and fled under a tempest of shells, of officers shot
by their own guns, of a general cashiered for grievous errors.

From Liège there came more news. The imagination of Paris,
deprived of all sustenance as regards its own troops, fed greedily
upon the banquet of blood which had been given to it by the gallant
Belgians. In messages coming irregularly through the days and
nights, three or four lines at a time, it was possible to grasp the main
facts of that heroic stand against the German legions. We were able
to perceive from afar the raking fire of the forts around the city, which
swept the ground so that the most famous regiments of the German
army were mowed down as they advanced with desperate courage.

"If Liège holds out the German troops are in a hopeless position."
These words were repeated along the boulevards of Paris, and
because Liège held out so long the spirit of Paris was exalted.

But, as a journalist out to see things, I was depressed. It was useless
to wait in Paris while the days were slipping by and history was being
made. Official permission was delayed, by fair and courteous words. I
decided to go in search of the war without permission and to get
somehow or other behind the scenes of its secrecy. So my
adventures began, and in a little while my eyes became seared with
the sight of tragedy and my soul filled with the enormous woe of war.


6


It was a strange kind of melodrama that experience in the first two
months of the war. Looking back upon it now, it has just the effect of
a prolonged nightmare stimulated by hasheesh or bang--fantastic, full
of confused dreams, changing kaleidoscopically from one scene to
another, with vivid clear-cut pictures, intensely imagined, between
gulfs of dim twilight memories, full of shadow figures, faces seen a
little while and then lost, conversations begun abruptly and then
ended raggedly, poignant emotions lasting for brief moments and
merging into others as strong but of a different quality, gusts of
laughter rising between moods of horrible depression, tears
sometimes welling from the heart and then choked back by a brutal
touch of farce, beauty and ugliness in sudden clashing contrasts, the
sorrow of a nation, the fear of a great people, the misery of women
and children, the intolerable anguish of multitudes of individuals each
with a separate agony, making a dark background to this too real
dream from which there was no awakening.

I was always travelling during those eight or nine weeks of history--for
the most time I had two companions with me--dear fellows whose
comradeship was a fine personal pleasure, in spite of all the pain into
which we plunged. Together we journeyed continually and
prodigiously, covering thousands of miles during those weeks, in all
sorts of directions, by all sorts of ways, in troop trains and cattle
trucks, in motor-cars and taxi-cabs, and on Shanks's nag. There were
no couriers in those days between France and England, and to get
our dispatches home we often had to take them across the Channel,
using most desperate endeavours to reach a port of France in time
for the next boat home and staying in Fleet Street only a few hours
before hurrying back to Dover or Folkestone in order to plunge again
into the fever of invaded France. Later Paris was our goal, and we
would struggle back to it along lines choked with munitions of war or
completely held for the transport of great masses of troops, arriving,
at night as a rule, weary for lack of sleep, dirty from the filth of cattle
trucks crowded with unwashed men and women, hungry after
meagre rations of biscuits and cheese, mentally and physically
exhausted, so that one such night I had to be carried upstairs to my
room, so weak that I could not drag one leg after the other nor lift a
hand from the coverlet. On another day one of my companions--the
Strategist--sat back, rather quiet, in a taxi-cab which panted in a
wheezy way along the interminably straight roads of France, through
villages from which all their people had fled under the shadow of a
great fear which followed them, until when the worn-out vehicle could
go no further, but halted helplessly on a lonely highway remote as it
seemed from any habitation, my friend confessed that he was weak
even as a new-born babe and could not walk a hundred yards to
save his life. Yet he is a strong man who had never been in a doctor's
hands since childhood.

His weakness, the twist of pain about his mouth, the weariness in his
eyes, scared us then. The Philosopher, who had not yet begun to feel
in his bones the heat of the old tropical fever which afterwards made
him toss at nights and call out strange words, shook his head and
spoke with the enormous gravity which gives an air of prophecy and
awful wisdom to a man whose sense of humour and ironic wit have
often twisted me into painful knots of mirth. But there was no glint of
humour in the Philosopher's eyes when he stared at the greyness of
the Strategist.

"The pace has been too hot," he said. "We seem to forget that there's
a limit to the strain we can put on the human machine. It's not only
the physical fatigue. It's the continual output of nervous energy. All
this misery, all that damn thing over there"--he waved his paw at the
darkening hills beyond which was a great hostile army--"the sight of
all these refugees spilt out of their cities and homes as though a great
hand had tipped up the earth, is beginning to tell on us, my lads. We
are spending our reserve force, and we are just about whacked!"

Yet we went on, mixed up always in refugee rushes, in masses of
troops moving forward to the front or backwards in retreat, getting
brief glimpses of the real happenings behind the screen of secrecy,
meeting the men who could tell us the hidden truth, and more than
once escaping, by the nick of time only, from a death-trap into which
we had tumbled unwittingly, not knowing the whereabouts of the
enemy, nor his way of advance.


7


In the early days of the war, the first stampede which overwhelmed
us had a touch of comedy unless one's imagination were shocked by
the panic of great crowds, in which always and for whatever cause
there is something degrading to the dignity of human nature. It was
the panic rush of the world's tourists suddenly trapped by war in the
pleasure haunts of Europe. They had come out to France,
Switzerland, Italy and Egypt with well-lined purses, for the most part,
and with the absolute conviction not disturbed by any shadow of
doubt, that their ways would be made smooth by Cook's guides, hotel
managers, British and American consuls, and foreigners of all classes
eager to bow before them, to show them the sights, to carry their
baggage, to lick, if need be, their boots. They had money, they
belonged to the modern aristocracy of the well-to-do. Was not Europe
their garden of pleasure, providing for them, in return for the price of a
season ticket, old monuments, famous pictures, sunsets over Swiss
mountains, historic buildings starred by Baedeker, peculiar customs
of aborigines, haunts of vice to be viewed with a sense of virtue, and
good hotels in which there was a tendency to over-eat?

The pleasure of these rich Americans and comfortable English
tourists was suddenly destroyed by the thunderbolt of war. They were
startled to find that strong laws were hastily enacted against them and
put in force with extraordinary brutality. Massed under the name of
étrangers--they had always looked upon the natives as the only
foreigners--they were ordered to leave certain countries and certain
cities within twenty-four hours, otherwise they would be interned in
concentration camps under armed guards for the duration of the war.
But to leave these countries and cities they had to be provided with a
passport--hardly an American among them had such a document--
and with a laisser-passer to be obtained from the police and
countersigned by military authorities, after strict interrogation.

The comedy began on the first day of mobilization, and developed
into real tragedy as the days slipped by. For although at first there
was something a little ludicrous in the plight of the well-to-do, brought
down with a crash to the level of the masses and loaded with paper
money which was as worthless as Turkish bonds, so that the
millionaire was for the time being no richer than the beggar, pity
stirred in one at the sight of real suffering and anguish of mind.

Outside the commissariats de police in Paris and provincial towns of
France, like Dijon and Lyons, and in the ports of Calais, Boulogne
and Dieppe, there were great crowds of these tourists lined up in
queue and waiting wearily through the hours until their turn should
come to be measured with their backs to the wall and to be
scrutinized by'police officers, sullen after a prolonged stream of
entreaty and expostulation, for the colour of their eyes and hair, the
shape of their noses and chins, and the "distinctive marks" of their
physical beauty or ugliness.

"I guess I'll never come to this Europe again!" said an American lady
who had been waiting for five hours in a side street in Paris for this
ordeal. "It's a cruel shame to treat American citizens as though they
were thieves and rogues. I wonder the President of the United States
don't make a protest about it. Are people here so ignorant they don't
even know the name of Josiah K. Schultz, of Boston, Massachusetts?"

The commissary's clerk inside the building was quite unmoved by the
name of Josiah K. Schultz, of Boston, Massachusetts. It held no
magic for him, and he seemed to think that the lady-wife of that
distinguished man might be a German spy with American papers. He
kept her waiting, deliberately, though she had waited for five hours in
the street outside.


8


The railway time-tables ceased to have a meaning after the first hour
of mobilization. Bradshaw became a lie and civil passengers were
only allowed on the rare trains which ran without notice at any hour of
the day or night, at the discretion of military officers, according to the
temporary freedom of the line from troop trains and supply trains.
Those tourist crowds suffered intolerable things, which I shared with
them, though I was a different kind of traveller. I remember one such
scene at Dijon, typical of many others. Because only one train was
starting on that day to the capital, and the time of it was utterly
unknown to the railway officials, three or four hundred people had to
wait hour after hour, for half a night, penned up in a waiting-room,
which became foul with the breath and heat of so many people. In
vain did they appeal to be let out on to the platform where there would
be more air and space. A sentry with fixed bayonet stood with his
back to them and barred the way. Old ladies sat down in despair on
their baggage, wedged between legs straddled across their bags. A
delicate woman near me swooned in the stifling atmosphere. I had
watched her grow whiter and whiter and heard the faintness of her
sighs, so that when she swayed I grasped her by the arm and held
her up until her husband relieved me of her weight. A Frenchwoman
had a baby at her breast. It cried with an unceasing wail. Other
babies were crying; and young girls, with sensitive nerves, were
exasperated by this wailing misery and the sickening smell which
pervaded this closed room.

When the train came in, the door was opened and there was a wild
rush for the carriages, without the English watchword of "women and
children first." Thrust on one side by sharp elbows, I and my two
friends struggled at last into the corridor, and for nineteen hours sat
there on the sharp edges of our upturned trunks, fixed rigidly between
the bodies of other travellers. To the left of us was a French peasant,
a big, quiet man, with a bovine gift of patience and utterly taciturn.
After the first five minutes I suspected that somewhere concealed
about his person was a ripe cheese. There was a real terror in the
malodorous vapours which exhaled from him. In a stealthy way they
crept down the length of the corridor, so that other people, far away,
flung open windows and thrust out heads, in spite of the night air with
a bite of frost in it. I dozed uneasily with horrid dreams as I sat on
three inches of hard box, with my head jogging sideways. Always I
was conscious of the evil smell about me, but when the peasant was
still I was able to suffer' it, because of sheer weariness, which
deadened my senses. It was when he moved, disturbing invisible
layers of air, that I awakened horribly.


10


For the nice people of the world whom fate had pampered, there was
a cruelty in this mode of travel. Hunger, with its sharp tooth, assailed
some of them for the first time. We stopped at wayside stations--still
more often between the stations--but American millionaires and
English aristocrats were stupefied to find that not all their money
could buy a sandwich. Most of the buffets had been cleaned out by
the army passing to the front. Thirst, intolerable and choking, was a
greater pain in those hot dog-days and in those tedious interminable
journeys.

Yet it is only fair to say that on the whole those tourists chased across
the Continent by the advancing spectre of war, behaved with pluck
and patience. Some of them had suffered grievous loss. From Bale
and Geneva to Paris and Boulogne the railways were littered with
their abandoned luggage, too bulky to be loaded into overcrowded
trains. On the roads of France were broken-down motor-cars which
had cost large sums of money in New York and London. But because
war's stupendous evil makes all other things seem trivial, and the gifts
of liberty and life are more precious than wealth or luxury, so these
rich folk in misfortune fraternized cheerfully in the discussion of their
strange adventures and shared the last drop of hot tea in a Thermos
flask with the generous instincts of shipwrecked people dividing their
rations on a desert isle.


11


This flight of the pleasure-seekers was the first revelation of the way
in which war would hurt the non-combatant and sacrifice his business
or his comfort to its supreme purpose. Fame was merely foolishness
when caught in the trap of martial law. I saw a man of European
reputation flourish his card before railway officials, to be thrust back
by the butt end of a rifle, No money could buy a seat in a railway
carriage already crowded to suffocation. No threat to write a letter to
the Times would avail an old-fashioned Englishman when his train
was shunted for hours on to a side line to make way for troop trains,
passing, passing, through the day and night. Nations were at war,
and whatever stood in the way of the war's machine would be
trampled underfoot or thrust on one side with brutal indifference. Their
fame did not matter nor their struggles to escape from a closing net.
Neither the beauty of women nor the weakness of children nor the
importance of the world's great somebodies mattered a jot. Nothing
mattered except fighting-men, and guns, and food for guns and men.


12


The French soldiers who were being sent towards the unknown front
--not knowing their own destination and forbidden to ask--had
recovered from the shock of the sudden call to the colours and the
tragedy of their hurried partings from wives, and sweethearts, and old
mothers, who are always dearest to Frenchmen's hearts. The thrill of
a nation's excitement brought a sparkle to their eyes and a flush to
their cheeks. The inherent gaiety of the French race rose triumphant
above the gloom and doubt which had preceded the declaration of
war. Would they never tire of singing the Marseillaise? Would all this
laughter which came in gusts through the open doors of cattle trucks
and the windows of third-class carriages change into the moan of the
wounded at their journey's end? It was hard to look forward to that
inevitable fate as I watched them pass. They had tied flowers to the
handles of their trains and twisted garlands round the bars. There
were posies in their kepis, and bouquets were pinned by the plump
hands of peasant girls to the jackets of the soldiers of the line,
gunners, cuirassiers, dragoons, and fusiliers marins. Between the
chorus of the Marseillaise came snatches of songs learnt in the
cabarets of Montmartre and the cafés chantants of provincial towns.
They swarmed like bees--in blue coats and red trousers--upon those
enormous troop trains which passed through Gournai and Pontoise,
Rouen and Amiens. Rows of them, grinning down under peaks at
freakish angles, dangled their legs over as they squatted on the roofs
of the wooden trucks. They hung on to the iron ladders of the guards'
vans. Sometimes six of them would be installed on the ledge behind
the funnel of the engine, with their russet faces to the wind. In the
argot of Paris slums, or in the dialects of seaport towns, they hurled
chaff at comrades waiting on the platforms with stacked arms, and
made outrageous love to girls who ran by the side of their trains with
laughing eyes and saucy tongues and a last farewell of "Bonne
chance, mes petits! Bonne chance et toujours la victoire!" At every
wayside halt artists were at work with white chalk drawing grotesque
faces on the carriage doors below which they scrawled inscriptions
referring to the death of "William," and banquets in Berlin, and
invitations for free trips to the Rhine. In exchange for a few English
cigarettes, too few for such trainloads, they gave me ovations of
enthusiasm, as though I stood for England.

"Vive l'Angleterre! Vos soldats, ou sont ils, camarade?" Where were
the English soldiers? It was always that question which sprang to their
lips. But for a little while I could not answer. It was strange. There was
no news of the crossing of the Expeditionary Force to France. In the
French and English newspapers no word was said about any British
soldiers on French soil. Was there some unaccountable delay, or
were we fulfilling our bond privately, a great drama being played
behind the scenes, like the secret war?


13


Then just for a moment the veil was lifted and Lord Kitchener allowed
the British people to know that their soldiers had landed on the other
side. Even then we who knew more than that were not allowed to
mention the places to which they had gone. Never mind. They were
here. We heard quite suddenly the familiar accents of English
Tommies in provincial towns of France, and came unexpectedly upon
khalfi-clad battalions marching and singing along the country roads.
For the first time there rang out in France the foolish ballad which has
become by a queer freak the war song of the British Army: "It's a long
way to Tipperary," learnt with comical accent by French peasants and
French girls, who, in those early days, in the first fine thrill of
enthusiasm, sang it emotionally as though it were a hymn, holding all
their love for England, all their hope of England's help, all their
admiration of these clean-shaven boys going to war in France in a
sporting spirit as though it were a great game. I went back to Paris for
a day when General French arrived, and even now in remembrance I
hear those shouts of "Vive l'Angleterre!" which followed the motor-car
in which our General made his triumphant progress. The shopgirls of
Paris threw flowers from the windows as the car passed. Dense
crowds of citizens thronged the narrow street of the Faubourg St.
Honoré, and waited patiently for hours outside the Embassy to catch
one glimpse of the strong, stern, thoughtful face of the man who had
come with his legions to assist France in the great hour of need. They
talked to each other about the inflexibility of his character, about the
massive jaw which, they said, would bite off Germany's head. They
cheered in the English manner, with a "Heep! heep! hooray!"--when
they caught sight for the first time of the khaki uniforms of English
officers on the steps of the Ministry of War. The arrival of English
troops here was red wine to the hearts of the French people. It
seemed to them the great guarantee of victory. "With England
marching side by side with us," they said, "we shall soon be in Berlin!"


14


A train-load of Royal Engineers came into one of the stations where I
happened to be waiting (my memory of those days is filled with weary
hours on station platforms). It was the first time I was able to talk to
British Tommies in France, and to shake their hands, and to shout
out "Good luck!" to them. It was curious how strong my emotion was
at seeing those laughing fellows and hearing the cockney accent of
their tongues. They looked so fine and clean. Some of them were
making their toilet in the cattle trucks brushing their hair as though for,
a picnic party, shaving before little mirrors tacked up on the planks.
Others, crowding at the open doorways of the trucks, shouted with
laughter at the French soldiers and peasants, who grabbed at their
hands and jabbered enthusiastic words of welcome.

"Funny lingo, Bill!" said one of the men. "Can't make out a bit of it. But
they mean well, I guess!"

It was impossible to doubt that they meant well, these soldiers of
France greeting their comrades of England. One man behaved like a
buffoon, or as though he had lost his wits. Grasping the hand of a
young engineer he danced round him, shouting "Camarade!
camarade!" in a joyous sing-song which was ridiculous, and yet
touching in its simplicity and faith. It was no wonder, I thought, that the
French people believed in victory now that the British had come. A
Jingo pride took possession of me. These Tommies of ours were the
finest soldiers in the world! They went to war with glad hearts. They
didn't care a damn for old Von Kluck and all his hordes. They would
fight like heroes, these clean-limbed chaps, who looked upon war as
a great game. Further along the train my two friends, the Philosopher
and the Strategist, were in deep conversation with different groups. I
heard gusts of laughter from the truck-load of men looking down on
the Philosopher. He had discovered a man from Wapping, I think,
and was talking in the accent of Stratford-atte-Bow to boys from that
familiar district of his youth. The Strategist had met the engineers in
many camps in England. They were surprised at his knowledge of
their business. And what were we doing out here? Newspaper
correspondents? Ah, there would be things to write about! When the
train passed out, with waving hands from every carriage, with
laughing faces caught already by the sun of France, with farewell
shouts of "Good luck, boys!" and "Bonne chance, camarades!" three
Englishmen turned away silently and could not speak for a minute or
two. Why did the Philosopher blink his eyes in such a funny way, as
though they smarted at specks of dust? And why did the Strategist
look so grave all of a sudden, as he stood staring after the train, with
his cap in his hand, so that the sunlight gleamed on his silver-grey
hair?


15


So the British Army had come to France, and a strange chapter was
being written in the history of the world, contrasting amazingly with
former chronicles. English battalions bivouacked by old French
houses which had looked down upon scenes of revolution in 1789,
and in the shadow of its churches which rang for French victories or
tolled for French defeats when Napoleon's generals were fighting
English regiments exactly one hundred years ago. In seaport villages
and towns which smell of tar and nets and absinthe and stale wine I
saw horses stabled in every inn-yard; streets were littered with straw,
and English soldiers sauntered about within certain strict boundaries,
studying picture postcards and giving the "glad eye" to any little
French girl who peeped at them through barred windows. Only
officers of high rank knew where they were bound. The men, devoid
of all curiosity, were satisfied with the general knowledge that they
were "on the continong," and well on the way to "have a smack at the
Germans." There was the rattle and rumble of English guns down
country highways. Long lines of khaki-clad men, like a writhing brown
snake when seen from afar, moved slowly along winding roads,
through cornfields where the harvest was cut and stacked, or down
long avenues of poplars, interminably straight, or through quaint old
towns and villages with whitewashed houses and overhanging
gables, and high stone steps leading to barns and dormer-chambers.
Some of those little provincial towns have hardly changed since
D'Artagnan and his Musketeers rode on their way to great adventures
in the days of Richelieu and Mazarin. And the spirit of D'Artagnan was
still bred in them, in the France of Poincaré, for they are the dwelling-
places of young men in the cuirassiers and the chasseurs who had
been chasing Uhlans through the passes of the Vosges, capturing
outposts even though the odds were seven to one.

The English officers and men will never have to complain of their
welcome in France. It was overwhelming--even a little intoxicating to
young soldiers. As they marched through the towns peasant girls ran
along the ranks with great bouquets of wild flowers, which they thrust
into the soldiers' arms. In every market square where the regiments
halted for a rest there was free wine for any thirsty throat, and soldier
boys from Scotland or England had their brown hands kissed by girls
who were eager for hero worship and had fallen in love with these
clean-shaven lads and their smiling grey eyes. In those early days
there seemed no evil in the worship of the women nor in the hearts of
the men who marched to the song of "Tipperary." Every man in khaki
could claim a hero's homage for himself on any road in France, at
any street corner of an old French town. It was some time before the
romance wore off, and the realities of human nature, where good is
mixed with evil and blackguardism marches in the same regiment
with clean-hearted men, destroyed some of the illusions of the French
and demanded an iron discipline from military police and made poor
peasant girls repent of their abandonment in the first ecstasy of their
joyous welcome.


16


Not yet did the brutalities of the war spoil the picture painted in khaki
tones upon the green background of the French countryside. From
my notebook I transcribe one of the word pictures which I wrote at the
time. It is touched with the emotion of those days, and is true to the
facts which followed:

"The weather has been magnificent. It has been no hardship to sleep
out in the roads and fields at night. A harvest moon floods the country
with silver light and glints upon the stacked bayonets of this British
Army in France when the men lie down beneath their coats, with their
haversacks as pillows. Each sleeping figure is touched softly by those
silver rays while the sentries pace up and down upon the outskirts of
the camp. Some of the days have been intensely hot, but the British
Tommy unfastens his coat and leaves his shirt open at the chest, and
with the sun bronzing his face to a deeper, richer tint, marches on,
singing a cockney ballad as though he were on the road to
Weybridge or Woking. They are young fellows, many of them--
beardless boys who have not yet been hard-bitten by a long
campaign and have not received their baptism of fire. Before they
have been many days in the fields of France they will not look so
fresh and smart. Those grey eyes of theirs will be haunted by the
memory of battlefields at night, when the stretcher-bearers are
searching for the wounded who lie among the dead. Not yet do these
boys know the real meaning of war. But they belong to the same
breed of men who a hundred years ago fought with Wellington in the
Peninsula. There is no possible need to doubt that they will maintain
the old traditions of their regiments and add new records to their
colours. Before this war is finished these soldiers of ours, who are
singing on their way, in dapper suits of khaki, will be all tattered and
torn, with straw tied round their feet, with stubby beards on their chins,
with the grime of gunpowder and dust and grease and mud and
blood upon their hands and faces. They will have lost the freshness
of their youth: but those who remain will have gained--can we doubt
it?--the reward of stubborn courage and unfailing valour."


17


Not many days after these words were written, I came upon a scene
which fulfilled them, too quickly. At a French junction there was a
shout of command in English, and I saw a body of men in khaki, with
Red Cross armlets, run across a platform to an incoming train from
the north, with stretchers and drinking bottles. A party of English
soldiers had arrived from a battle at a place called Mons. With French
passengers from another train, I was kept back by soldiers with fixed
bayonets, but through the hedge of steel I saw a number of
"Tommies" with bandaged heads and limbs descending from the
troop train. Some of them hung limp between their nurses. Their
faces, so fresh when I had first seen them on the way out, had
become grey and muddy, and were streaked with blood. Their khaki
uniforms were torn and cut. One poor boy moaned pitiably as they
carried him away on a stretcher. They were the first fruits of this
unnatural harvesting, lopped and maimed by a cruel reaper. I stared
at them with a kind of sickness, more agonized than afterwards when
I saw more frightful things. It came as a queer, silly shock to me then
to realize that in this secret war for which I was searching men were
really being smashed and killed, and that out of the mystery of it, out
of the distant terror from which great multitudes were fleeing, out of
the black shadow creeping across the sunlit hills of France, where the
enemy, whom no fugitives had seen, was advancing like a moving
tide, there should come these English boys, crippled and broken,
from an unknown battle. I was able to speak to one of them, wounded
only in the hand, but there was no time for more than a question or
two and an answer which hardly gave me definite knowledge.

"We got it in the neck!" said the sergeant of the R.F.A. He repeated
the words as if they held all truth. "We got it in the neck!" "Where?" I
asked.

He waved his wounded hand northwards, and said: "Mons."

"Do you mean we were beaten? In retreat?" He shrugged his
shoulders.

"We gave 'em what for. Oh, yes, they had to pay right enough. But
they were too much for us. Came on like lice... swarming... Couldn't
kill enough... Then we got it in the neck... Lost a good few men...
Gord, I've never seen such work! South Africa? No more than child's
play to this 'ere game!"

He gave a queer kind of grin, with no mirth in his eyes, and went
away with the other wounded men.

Mons? It was the first I had heard of a battle there And our men were
having a hard time. The enemy were too much for us. Was it a
retreat? Perhaps a rout?


18


The Philosopher answered these unspoken questions.

"You always get the gloomy view from wounded men. I dare say it's
not an easy thing to stop those blighters, but I've faith in the justice of
God. The Great Power ain't going to let Prussian militarism win out.
It's going to be smashed because of its essential rottenness. It's all
right, laddie!"

The Strategist was studying his map, and working out military
possibilities.

"Mons. I expect our next line of defence will be Le Cateau and
Cambrai. If we're hard pressed we shall hear something about St.
Quentin, too. It's quite on the cards we shall have to fall back, but I
hope to Heaven in good order and with sound lines of communication."

"It's frightful!" I said. "We are seeing nothing of all this. Nothing!
If only we could get near it!"


19


It was some time before we heard the guns, but not long before we
saw the effects of war, in blood, anguish, and tears.

The French newspapers, telling little of the truth, giving barely one
single fact to a page full of heroic sentiment, had not let us guess
that, beyond the frontiers of France, the enemy was doing frightful
damage, with a rapidity and ruthlessness which, after the check at
Liège, was a tremendous menace to the Allied armies. I understood
these things better, in a stark nakedness of truth, when I found myself
caught in the tumult of a nation in flight.

I have already touched upon one tide of panic--the stampede of the
pleasure-seekers. That was a mere jest lacking all but the touch of
cruelty which gives a spice to so many of life's witticisms; but the
second tide, overflowing in wave after wave of human misery,
reached great heights of tragedy which submerged all common
griefs. From that day in August until many months of war had passed
I was seldom out of sight of this ruin of Belgium.

I went into the heart of it, into the welter of blood and wreckage, and
stood, expecting death, in the very process of its deadly torture.
Week after week, month after month, I walked and talked with
Belgian fugitives, and drifted in that stream of exiled people, and
watched them in the far places of their flight, where they were
encamped in settled hopelessness, asking nothing of the fate which
had dealt them such foul blows, expecting nothing. But I still
remember my first impressions of war's cruelty to that simple people
who had desired to live in peace and had no quarrel with any Power.
It was in a kind of stupor that I saw the vanguard of this nation in
retreat, a legion of poor old women whose white hairs were wild in this
whirl of human derelicts, whose decent black clothes were rumpled
and torn and fouled in the struggle for life; with Flemish mothers
clasping babies at their breasts and fierce-eyed as wild animals
because of the terror in their hearts for those tiny buds of life; with
small children scared out of the divine security of childhood by this
abandonment of homes which had seemed the world to them, and
terrorized by an unknown horror which lurked in the name of
Germany; with men of all classes and all ages, intellectuals and
peasants, stout bourgeois, whose overload of flesh was a burden to
their flight, thin students whose book-tired eyes were filled with a
dazed bewilderment, men of former wealth and dignity reduced to
beggary and humiliation; with school-girls whose innocence of life's
realities was suddenly thrust face to face with things ugly and
obscene, and cruel as hell.


20


I think it is impossible to convey to those who did not see this exodus
of the Belgian people the meaning and misery of it. Even in the midst
of it I had a strange idea at first that it was only a fantasy and that
such things do not happen. Afterwards I became so used to it all that
I came to think the world must always have been like this, with people
always in flight, families and crowds of families drifting about
aimlessly, from town to town, getting into trains just because they
started somewhere for somewhere else, sitting for hours on bundles
which contained all their worldly goods saved from the wreckage of
ancient homes, losing their children on the roadside, and not fretting
very much, and finding other children, whom they adopted as their
own; never washing on that wandering, so that delicate women who
had once been perfumed with fine scents were dirty as gipsies and
unashamed of draggled dresses and dirty hands; eating when they
found a meal of charity, sleeping in railway sidings, coalsheds, and
derelict trains shunted on to grass-covered lines; careless as pariah
dogs of what the future held in store now that they had lost all things
in the past.


21


On the railway sidings near Calais there was one sight that revealed
the defeat of a nation more even than these crowds of refugees.
Hundreds of Belgian engines had been rushed over the frontier to
France to escape from being used in the enemy's service. These
derelict things stood there in long rows with a dismal look of
lifelessness and abandonment, and as I looked at them I knew that
though the remnants of the Belgian army might be fighting in its last
ditch and holding out at Antwerp against the siege guns of the
Germans, there could be no hope of prolonged resistance against
overwhelming armies. These engines, which should have been used
for Belgian transport, for men and food and guns, were out of action,
and dead symbols of a nation's ruin.


22


For the first time I saw Belgian soldiers in France, and although they
were in small number compared with the great army of retreat which,
after the fall of Antwerp, I saw marching into Dunkirk, their weariness
and listlessness told a tale of woe. At first sight there was something
comical in the aspect of these top-hatted soldiers. They reminded me
of battalions of London cabbies who had ravaged the dustbins for
discarded "toppers." Their double-breasted coats had just the cut of
those of the ancient jehus who used to sit aloft on decrepit "growlers."
Other bodies of Belgian soldiers wore ludicrous little képis with
immense eye-shades, mostly broken or hanging limp in a dejected
way. In times of peace I should have laughed at the look of them. But
now there was nothing humorous about these haggard, dirty men
from Ghent who had borne the first shock of the German attack. They
seemed stupefied for lack of sleep, or dazed after the noise of battle.
I asked some of them where they were going, but they shook their
heads and answered gloomily:

"We don't know. We know nothing, except that our Belgium is
destroyed. What is the news?"


23


There was no news--beyond what one could glean from the
incoherent tales of Belgian refugees. The French newspapers still
contained vague and cheerful bulletins about their own military
situation, and filled the rest of their meagre space with eloquent
praise of les braves petits Belges. The war was still hidden behind
impenetrable walls of silence. Gradually, however, as I dodged about
the western side of France, from the middle to the end of August, it
became clear to me, and to my two friends, the Philosopher and the
Strategist, who each in his way of wisdom confirmed my worst
suspicions, that the situation for both the French and the British
armies was enormously grave. In spite of the difficulty of approaching
the war zone--at that time there was no certain knowledge as to the
line of front--we were seeing things which could not be concealed by
any censorship. We saw, too clearly for any doubt, that the war zone
was approaching us, steadily and rapidly. The shadow of its looming
terror crept across the fields of France, though they lay all golden in
the sunlight of the harvest month.


24


After the struggling tides of fugitive tourists, and overlapping the
waves of Belgian refugees, there came new streams of panic-stricken
people, and this time they were French. They came from the northern
towns--Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Armentières, and from scores of
villages further south which had seemed utterly safe and aloof from
hostile armies which, with faith in official communiqués issued by the
French Ministry of War, we believed to be still checked beyond the
French frontier in Belgium. Lille? Was Lille threatened by the Kaiser's
troops? It had been evacuated? No, that could not be true, unless
treachery had been at work, Lille could hold out, surely, at least as
long as Liège! Had we not read long articles by the military experts of
the French Press describing the strength of that town and the
impregnable position of its forts? Yet here were refugees from Lille
who had heard the roar of German guns, and brought incredible
stories of French troops in retreat, and spoke the name of a French
general with bitter scorn, and the old cry of "Nous sommes trahis!"

The refugees from the north were in as pitiable a state as those who
had preceded them from Belgium. More pitiable, because when they
reached such ports as Calais or Boulogne or Havre, the hotels and
lodging-houses were overcrowded from attic to cellars, the buffets
had been swept clear of food, and committees of relief were already
distracted with the overwhelming needs of a Belgian invasion.


25


I remember a day and night in Boulogne. The narrow streets--evil with
odours brought forth by a hot sun, were filled with surging crowds
which became denser as new trains arrived from Calais and Dunkirk
and junctions on northern lines. The people carried with them the
salvage of their homes, wrapped up in blankets, sheets, towels and
bits of ragged paper. Parcels of grotesque shapes, containing
copper pots, frying pans, clocks, crockery and all kinds of
domestic utensils or treasured ornaments, bulged on the pavements
and quaysides, where whole families sat encamped. Stalwart
mothers of Normandy and Picardy trudged through the streets with
children clinging to their skirts, with babies in their arms and with big
French loaves--the commissariat of these journeys of despair--
cuddled to their bosoms with the babes. Old grandfathers and
grandmothers, who looked as though they had never left their native
villages before, came hand in hand, with shaking heads and watery
eyes, bewildered by all this turmoil of humanity which had been thrust
out, like themselves, from its familiar ways of life. Well-to-do
bourgeois, shot with frayed nerves, exhausted by an excess of
emotion and fatigue, searched for lodgings, anywhere and at any
price, jostled by armies of peasants, shaggy-haired, in clumping
sabots, with bundles on their backs, who were wandering on the
same quest for the sake of the women and children dragging wearily
in their wake. I heard a woman cry out words of surrender: "Je n'en
peux plus!" She was spent and could go no further, but halted
suddenly, dumped down her bundles and her babies and, leaning
against a sun-baked wall, thrust the back of a rough hand across her
forehead, with a moan of spiritual pain.

"Dieu! ... C'est trop! c'est trop!"

All day long these scenes went on, until I could bear them no longer,
but went indoors to the room which made me feel a selfish monster
because I shared it with only two friends. Boulogne became quiet in
the darkness. Perhaps by some miracle all those homeless ones had
found a shelter. ... I awakened out of a drowsy sleep to hear the
tramp of innumerable feet. A new army of fugitives had come into the
town, I heard voices murmuring below my window, arguing, pleading.
There was a banging at doors down the street.

"C'est impossible! Il n'y a pas de place! Il y a une foule qui dort en
plein air. Voyez! voyez!"

The night porter slammed his own door in a rage. Perhaps there was
pity in his heart as well as rage, but what can a man do when people
demand admittance to an hotel where there are already six people in
the bathroom and sixty on the floor of the salon, and stiff bodies
wrapped in blankets, like corpses in eternal sleep, lying about in the
corridors?

"There are crowds of people sleeping in the open air," he said, and
when I leaned out of the window, staring into the darkness of the
night and breathing in the cool air which had an autumn touch, I saw
dimly on the pavement below huddled figures in the doorways and
under the shelter of the eaves. A baby wailed with a thin cry. A
woman's voice whimpered just below my window, and a man spoke
to her.

"C'est la guerre!"

The words came up to me as though to answer the question in my
own mind as to why such things should be.

"C'est la guerre!"

Yes, it was war; with its brutality against women and children, its
horrible stupidity, its senseless overthrow of all life's decencies, and
comforts, and security. The non-combatants were not to be spared,
though they had not asked for war, and hated it.




Chapter IV
The Way Of Retreat



1


Ominous things were happening behind the screen. Good God! was
France to see another année terrible, a second edition of 1870, with
the same old tale of unreadiness, corruption in high quarters,
breakdown of organization, and national humiliation after irreparable
disasters?

The very vagueness of the official communiqués and their word-
jugglings to give a rose colour to black shadows advancing rapidly
over the spirit of France suggested horrible uncertainties to those
who were groping in search of plain truth. But not all the severity of
the censorship, with its strangle-grip upon the truth-tellers, could hide
certain frightful facts. All these refugees pouring down from the north
could not be silenced, though none of their tales appeared in print.
They came with the news that Lille was invested, that the German
tide was rolling upon Armentières, Roubaix, Tourcoing and Cambrai,
that the French and English were in hard retreat. The enemy's
cavalry was spreading out in a great fan, with outposts of Uhlans
riding into villages where old French peasants had not dreamed of
being near the line of battle until, raising their heads from potato fields
or staring across the stacked corn, they had seen the pointed
casques and the flash of the sun on German carbines.

There were refugees who had seen the beginning of battles, taking
flight before the end of them. I met some from Le Cateau, who had
stared speechlessly at familiar hills over which came without warning
great forces of foreign soldiers. The English had come first, in clouds
of dust which powdered their uniforms and whitened their sun-baked
faces. They seemed in desperate hurry and scratched up mounds of
loose earth, like children building sand castles, and jumped down into
wayside ditches which they used as cover, and lay on their stomachs
in the beetroot fields. They were cheerful enough, and laughed as
they littered the countryside with beef tins, and smoked cigarettes
incessantly, as they lay scorched under the glare of the sun, with their
rifles handy. Their guns were swung round with their muzzles nosing
towards the rising ground from which these English soldiers had
come. It seemed as though they were playing games of make
believe, for the fun of the thing. The French peasants had stood
round grinning at these English boys who could not understand a
word of French, but chattered cheerfully all the time in their own
strange language. War seemed very far away. The birds were singing
in a shrill chorus. Golden flowerlets spangled the green slopes. The
sun lay warm upon the hillside, and painted black shadows beneath
the full foliage of the trees. It was the harvest peace which, these
peasants had known all the years of their lives. Then suddenly the
click of rifle bolts, a rapid change in the attitude of the English soldier
boys, who stared northwards where the downs rose and fell in soft
billows, made the French peasants j gaze in that direction, shading
their eyes from the hot sun. What was that grey shadow moving?
What were those little glints and flashes in the greyness of it? What
were all those thousands of little ant-like things crawling forward over
the slopes? Thousands and scores of thousands of--men, and
horses and guns!

"Les Anglais? Toujours les Anglais?" An English officer laughed, in a
queer way, without any mirth in his eyes.

"Les Allemands, mon vieux. Messieurs les Boches!"

"L'enemi? Non--pas possible!"

It only seemed possible that it was the enemy when from that army of
ants on the hillsides there came forth little puffs of white smoke, and
little stabbing flames, and when, quite soon, some of those English
boys lay in a huddled way over their rifles, with their sunburned faces
on the warm earth. The harvest peace was broken by the roar of
guns and the rip of bullets. Into the blue of the sky rose clouds of
greenish smoke. Pieces of jagged steel, like flying scythes, sliced the
trees on the roadside. The beetroot fields spurted up earth, and great
holes were being dug by unseen ploughs. Then, across the distant
slopes behind the smoke clouds and the burst of flame came, and
came, a countless army, moving down towards those British soldiers.
So the peasants had fled with a great fear.


2


There was an extraordinary quietude in some of the port towns of
northern France. At first I could not understand the meaning of it
when I went from Calais to Boulogne, and then to Havre. In Calais I
saw small bodies of troops moving out of the town early in the
morning, so that afterwards there was not a soldier to be seen about
the streets. In Boulogne the same thing happened, quietly, and
without any bugle calls or demonstrations. Not only had all the
soldiers gone, but they were followed by the police, whom I saw
marching away in battalions, each man carrying a little bundle, like
the refugees who carried all their worldly goods with them, wrapped in
a blanket or a pocket-handkerchief, according to the haste of their
flight. Down on the quay there were no custom-house officers to
inspect the baggage of the few travellers who had come across the
Channel and now landed on the deserted siding, bewildered because
there were no porters to clamour for their trunks and no douane to
utter the familiar ritual of "Avez-vous quelque-chose à declarer?
Tabac? Cigarettes?" For the first time in living memory, perhaps in
the history of the port, the Douane of Boulogne had abandoned its
office. What did it all mean? Why were the streets so deserted as
though the town had been stricken with the plague?

There was a look of plague in the faces of the few fishermen and
harbour folk who stood in groups at the street corners. There was a
haggard fear in their eyes and they talked in low voices, as though
discussing some doom that had come upon them. Even the houses
had a plaguy aspect, with shuttered windows and barred doors. The
town, which had resounded to the tramp of British regiments and to
the tune of "Tipperary," these streets through which had surged a tide
of fugitives, with wave after wave of struggling crowds, had become a
silent place, with only a few shadows creeping through the darkness
of that evening in war, and whispering a fear.

The truth came to me as a shock. The ports of France had been
abandoned. They lay open to the enemy, and if any Uhlans came
riding in, or a German officer in a motorcar with three soldiers to
represent an army, Calais and Boulogne would be surrendered
without a shot.

Looking back upon those days the thing seems inconceivable.
Months afterwards the enemy tried to fight its way to Calais and failed
after desperate attacks which cost the lives of thousands of German
soldiers and a stubborn defence which, more than once, was almost
pierced and broken. "The Fight for Calais" is a chapter of history
which for the Germans is written in blood. It is amazing to remember
that in the last days of August Calais was offered as a free gift, with
Boulogne and Dieppe to follow, if they cared to come for them.

Even Havre was to be abandoned as the British base. It was only a
little while since enormous stores had been dumped here for the
provisioning and equipment of our Expeditionary Force. Now I saw a
great packing up. "K." had issued an amazing order which made
certain young gentlemen of the A.S.C. whistle between their teeth
and say rather quietly: "Ye gods! things must be looking a bit blue up
there." The new base was to be much further south, at St. Nazaire, to
which the last tin of bully beef or Maconochie was to be consigned,
without delay. Yes, things were looking very "blue," just then.


3


One may afford now to write about mistakes, even the mistakes of
our French Allies, who have redeemed them all by a national heroism
beyond the highest words of praise, and by a fine struggle for
efficiency and organization which were lamentably lacking in the early
days of the war. Knowing now the frightful blunders committed at the
outset, and the hair's-breadth escape from tremendous tragedy, the
miracle of the sudden awakening which enabled France to shake off
her lethargy and her vanity, and to make a tiger's pounce upon an
enemy which had almost brought her to her knees is one of the
splendid things in the world's history which wipe out all rankling
criticism.

Yet then, before the transformation, the days were full of torture for
those who knew something of the truth. By what fatal microbe of folly
had the French generals been tempted towards that adventure in
Alsace? Sentiment, overwhelming common sense, had sent the
finest troops in France to the frontiers of the "lost provinces," so that
Paris might have its day of ecstasy round the statue of Quand-Même.
While the Germans were smashing their way through Belgium,
checked only a little while at Liège and giving a clear warning of the
road by which they would come to France, the French active army
was massed in the east from Luxembourg to Nancy and wasting the
strength which should have been used to bar the northern roads, in
pressing forward to Mulhouse and Altkirch. It gave Georges Scott the
subject of a beautiful allegory in L'Illustration--that French soldier
clasping the Alsatian girl rescued from the German grip. It gave
Parisian journalists, gagged about all other aspects of the war zone, a
chance of heroic writing, filled with the emotion of old heartaches now
changed to joy. Only the indiscretion of a deputy hinted for a moment
at a bad reverse at Mulhouse, when a regiment recruited from the
South, broke and fled under the fire of German guns because they
were unsupported by their own artillery. "Two generals have been
cashiered." "Some of the officers have been shot." Tragic rumours
leaked into Paris, spoiling the dream of an irresistible advance.

So far, however, neither Paris nor the French public as a whole had
any inkling of graver things than this. They did not know--how could
they know anything of this secret war?--that on all parts of the front
the French armies' were falling back before the German invasion
which bore down upon them in five great columns of overwhelming
strength; and that on the extreme left, nearest to Paris, the French
army was miserably weak, made up for the most part of old
Territorials who were never meant to be in the first line of defence,
and of African regiments who had never seen shell-fire, so that the
main German attack could only be held back by a little British army
which had just set foot on the soil of France.

Everywhere, from east to west, the French were yielding before the
terrific onslaught of the German legions, who came on in close
formation, reckless of their losses, but always advancing, over the
bodies of their dead, with masses of light artillery against which the
French gunners, with all their skill and courage, could not hold
ground. By a series of strange adventures, which took me into the
vortex of the French retreat, into the midst of confused movements of
troops rushed up to various points of menace and into the tide of
wounded which came streaming back from the fighting lines, I was
able to write the first account which gave any clear idea of the general
situation--sharing this chance with the Philosopher and the Strategist
who were my fellow travellers--and, by good luck again, the censor
was kind to me in England. French officers and soldiers with
bandaged heads and limbs told me their stories, while their wounds
were still wet, and while their clothes still reeked of the smoke of
battle. Women who had fled with empty hands from little châteaux on
the hillsides of France, with empty hearts too because they had no
hope for husbands still fighting in the inferno, described to me the
scenes which still made them pant like wild animals caught after a
chase. And with my own eyes I saw the unforgettable drama of the
French army in retreat, blowing up bridges on its way, shifting to new
lines of defence, awaiting with its guns ready for a new stage of the
enemy's advance.

Out of a wild confusion of impressions, the tumult of these scenes,
the inevitable contradictions and inconsistencies and imaginings of
men and women drunk with the excitement of this time, I sorted out
some clear threads of fact and with the aid of the Strategist, who
spread out his maps on wayside banks, blotting out the wild flowers,
or on the marble-topped tables outside fly-blown estaminets in village
streets, tracked out the line of the German advance and saw the peril
of the French.

From one of my dispatches I transcribe a narrative which records one
of the most bloody battles in the first phase of the war. Written to the
jolt of a troop train, in which wounded men hugged their bandaged
hands, it tells how five thousand Frenchmen did their best to check a
German army corps.


4


August 29

It was nearly a fortnight ago that the Germans concentrated their
heaviest forces upon Namur, and began to press southwards and
over the Meuse Valley. After the battle of Dinant the French army,
among whom, at this point, were the 2nd and the 7th Corps, were
heavily outnumbered at the time, and had to fall back gradually in
order to gain time for reinforcements to come up to their support. The
French artillery was up on the wooded heights above the river, and
swept the German regiments with a storm of fire as they advanced.
On the right bank the French infantry was entrenched, supported by
field guns and mitrailleuses, and did very deadly work before leaping
from the trenches which they occupied and taking up position in new
trenches further back, which they held with great tenacity. In justice to
the Germans, it must be said that they were heroic in their courage.
They were reckless of their lives, and the valley of the Meuse was
choked with their corpses. The river itself was strewn with dead
bodies of men and horses, and literally ran red with blood. The most
tremendous fighting took place for the possession of the bridges, but
the French engineers blew them up one after the other as they retired
southwards. No fewer than thirty-three bridges were destroyed in this
way before they could be seized by the German advance guard. The
fighting was extended for a considerable distance on either side of
the Meuse, and many engagements took place between the French
and German cavalry and regiments working away from the main
armies.

There was, for instance, a memorable encounter at Merville which is
one of the most heroic episodes of the war. Five thousand French
soldiers of all arms, with quick-firers, engaged twenty thousand
German infantry. In spite of being outnumbered in this way, the
French dash and "bite," as they call it, was so splendid that they beat
back the enemy from point to point in a fight lasting for twelve hours,
inflicting a tremendous punishment, and suffering very few losses on
their own side. A German officer captured in this engagement
expressed his unbounded admiration for the valour of the French
troops, which he described as "superb." It was only for fear of getting
too far out of touch with the main forces that the gallant five thousand
desisted from their irresistible attack, and retired, with a large number
of German helmets as trophies of their victorious action.
Nevertheless, in accordance with the general plan which had been
decided upon by the French generals in view of the superior numbers
pressing upon them, the French troops retreated and the Germans
succeeded in forcing their way steadily down the Meuse as far as
Mézières, divided by a bridge from Charleville on the other side of the
river. This is in the neighbourhood of Sedan, and in the hollow or trou
as it is called which led to the great disaster of 1870, when the French
army was caught in a trap, and threatened with annihilation by the
Germans, who had taken possession of the surrounding heights.
There was to be no repetition of that tragedy. The French were
determined that this time the position would be reversed.

On Monday, August 24, the town of Charleville was evacuated, most
of its civilians were sent away to join the wanderers who had had to
leave their homes, and the French troops took up magnificent
positions commanding the town and the three bridges dividing it from
Mézières. Mitrailleuses were hidden in the abandoned houses, and
as a disagreeable shock to any German who might escape their fire
was a number of the enemy's guns--no fewer than ninety-five of
them--which had been captured and disabled by the French troops in
the series of battles down the river from Namur. The German
outposts reached Charleville on Tuesday, August 25. They were
allowed to ride quietly across the bridges into the apparently deserted
town. Then suddenly their line of retreat was cut off. The three
bridges were blown up by contact mines, and the mitrailleuses hidden
in the houses were played on to the German cavalry across the
streets, killing them in a frightful slaughter. It was for a little while a
sheer massacre in that town of white houses with pretty gardens
where flowers were blooming under the brilliant sunshine of a glorious
summer day.

But the Germans fought with extraordinary tenacity, regardless of the
heaped bodies of their comrades, and utterly reckless of their own
lives. They, too, had brought quick-firers across the bridges and,
taking cover behind some of the houses, trained their guns upon
those from which the French gunners were firing their last shots.
There was no way of escape for those heroic men who voluntarily
sacrificed themselves in the service of their country, and it is probable
that every man died, because at such a time the Germans are not in
the habit of giving quarter. When the main German advance came
down the valley the French artillery on the heights raked them with a
terrific fire in which they suffered heavy losses, the forefront of the
column being mowed down. But under this storm of fire they
proceeded with incredible coolness to their pontoon bridges across
the river, and although hundreds of men died on the banks they
succeeded in their endeavour while their guns searched the hills with
shells and forced the French gunners to retire from their positions.
The occupation of Charleville was a German victory, but it was also a
German graveyard.

After this historic episode in what had been an unending battle, the
main body of the French troops withdrew before the Germans, who
were now pouring down the valley, and retired to new ground.


5


Meanwhile, on the western side of the battle line, the French army
was holding a crescent from Abbeville, round the south of Amiens,
and the situation was not a happy one in view of the rapid advance of
the enemy under General Von Kluck, before whom the British troops
were already in continual battle.

I shall not soon forget a dreadful night near Amiens, when I saw
beaten and broken men coming back from the firing lines, and the
death-carts passing down the roads. The whole day had been
exciting and unnerving. The roads along which I had passed were
filled with soldiers marching towards an enemy which was rapidly
drawing close upon them, for whom they seemed but ill-prepared--
and by civilians stampeding with wild rumours that the Uhlans were
close upon them.

They were not very far wrong. At Picquigny, they were less than four
miles distant--a small patrol of outposts belonging to the squadrons
which were sweeping out in a fan through the northern towns and
villages of France.

As I passed, French Territorials were hastily digging trenches close to
the railway line. Reports came from stations further along that the line
might be cut at any moment. A train crowded with French and Belgian
fugitives had come to a dead halt. The children were playing on the
banks--with that divine carelessness and innocence which made
one's heart ache for them in this beastly business of war--and their
fathers and mothers, whose worldly goods had been packed into
baskets and brown paper parcels--the poor relics of all that had been
theirs--wondered whether after all their sufferings and struggles they
would reach the town of Amiens and find safety there.

It was obvious to me that there was a thrill of uneasiness in the
military machine operating in the district. Troops were being hurried
up in a north-westerly direction. A regiment of Algerians came
swinging along the road. The sight of the Turcos put some heart into
the fugitives. Those brown faces were laughing like children at the
prospect of a fight. They waved their hands with the curious Arab
gesture of salute, and shuffled along merrily with their rifles slung
behind their backs. Military motor-cars carrying little parties of French
officers swept down the roads, and then there were no more
battalions but only stragglers, and hurrying fugitives driving along in
farmers' carts, packed with household goods, in two-wheeled gigs,
overburdened with women and children, riding on bicycles, with
parcels tied to the saddles, or trudging wearily and anxiously along,
away from the fear where the blood-red sun was setting over France.
It was pitiful to see the children clinging to the women's skirts along
that road of panic, and pitiful but fine, to see the courage of those
women. Then night fell and darkness came across the fields of
France, and through the darkness many grim shadows of war,
looming up against one's soul.

There was une affaire des patrouilles--what the British soldier calls a
"scrap"--along the road at Albert, between Amiens and Cambrai. A
party of German Uhlans, spreading out from a strong force at
Cambrai itself, had been engaged by the French Territorials, and after
some sharp fighting had retired, leaving several dead horses in the
dust and a few huddled forms from which the French soldiers had
taken burnished helmets and trophies to their women folk.

That was on Friday night of August 28. The real fighting was taking
place fifteen kilometres further along the road, at a place called
Bapeaume. All day on Friday there was very heavy fighting here on
the left centre, and a victory was announced by the French Ministry of
War.

I did not see the victory. I saw only the retreat of some of the French
forces engaged in the battle.

It was a few minutes before midnight on that Friday, when they came
back along the road to Amiens, crawling back slowly in a long, dismal
trail, with ambulance wagons laden with dead and dying, with hay-
carts piled high with saddles and accoutrements upon which there
lay, immobile, like men already dead, spent and exhausted soldiers.
They passed through crowds of silent people--the citizens of Amiens--
who only whispered as they stared at this procession in the darkness.
A cuirassier with his head bent upon his chest stumbled forward,
leading a horse too weak and tired to bear him. There were many
other men leading their poor beasts in this way; and infantry soldiers,
some of them with bandaged heads, clung on to the backs of the
carts and wagons, and seemed to be asleep as they shuffled by. The
light from the roadside lamps gleamed upon blanched faces and
glazed eyes--flashed now and then into the caverns of canvas-
covered carts where twisted, bandaged men lay huddled on the
straw. Not a groan came from those carts. There was no shout of
"Vive la France!" from the crowd of citizens who are not silent as a
rule when their soldiers pass.

Every one knew it was a retreat, and the knowledge was colder than
the mist of night. The carts, carrying the quick and the dead, rumbled
by in a long convoy, the drooping heads of the soldiers turned neither
to the right nor to the left for any greeting with old friends; there was a
hugger-mugger of uniforms on provision carts and ambulances. It
was a part of the wreckage and wastage of the war, and to the
onlooker, exaggerating unconsciously the importance of the things
close at hand and visible, it seemed terrible in its significance, and an
ominous reminder of 1870, when through Amiens there came the
dismal tramp of beaten men. Really this was the inevitable part of a
serious battle, and not necessarily the retreat from a great disaster.

I turned away from it, rather sick at heart. It is not a pleasant thing to
see men walking like living corpses, or as though drugged with
fatigue. It is heartrending to see poor beasts stumbling forward at
every step at the very last gasp of their strength until they fall never to
rise again.

But more pitiful even than this drift back from Bapeaume were the
scenes which followed immediately as I turned back into the town.
Thousands of boys had been called out to the colours, and had been
brought up from the country to be sent forward to the second lines of
defence. They were the reservists of the 1914 class, and many of
them were shouting and singing, though here and there a white-faced
boy tried to hide his tears as women from the crowd ran to embrace
him. The Marseillaise, the hymn of faith, rang out a little raggedly, but
bravely all the same. The lads--"poor children" they were called by a
white-haired man who watched them--were keeping up the valour of
their hearts by noisy demonstrations; but having seen the death-carts
pass through the darkness between lines of silent and dejected
onlookers, I could not bear to look into the faces of those little ones of
France who were following their fathers to the guns. Once again I had
to turn away to blot out the pictures of war in the velvety darkness of
the night.

Early next morning there was a thrill of anxiety in Amiens itself.
Reports had come through that the railway line had been cut between
Boulogne and Abbeville. There had been mysterious movements of
regiments from the town barracks. They had moved out of Amiens,
and there was a strange quietude in the streets, hardly a man in
uniform to be seen in places which had been filled with soldiers the
day before. I think only a few people realized the actual significance
of all this. Only a few--the friends of officers or the friends of
officers' friends--had heard that Amiens itself was to be evacuated.

To these people it seemed incredible and horrible--an admission that
France was being beaten to her knees. How could they believe the
theory of an optimist among them that it was a part of a great plan to
secure the safety of France? How could they realize that the town
itself would be saved from possible bombardment by this withdrawal
of the troops to positions which would draw the Germans into the
open? They only knew that they were undefended, and presently they
found that the civilian trains were being suspended, and that there
would be no way of escape. It was in the last train that by a stroke of
luck I escaped from Amiens. Shortly afterwards the tunnel leading to
the junction was blown up by the French engineers, and the beautiful
city of Amiens was cut off from all communication with the outer
world.

It was on the last train that I realized to the full of its bitterness the
brutality of war as it bludgeons the heart of the non-combatant. In the
carriage with me were French ladies and children who had been
hunted about the country in the endeavour to escape the zone of
military operations. Their husbands were fighting for France, and they
could not tell whether they were alive or dead. They had been without
any solid food for several days, and the nerves of those poor women
were tried to the uttermost, not by any fear for their own sakes, but for
the sake of the little ones who were all they could save from the
wreckage of their lives, all yet enough if they could save them to the
end. One lady whose house had been burnt by the Germans had
walked over twenty miles with a small boy and girl.

For a little while, when she told me her story she wept passionately,
yet only for a few minutes. For the sake of her handsome boy, who
had a hero's courage, and for the tiny girl who clung to her, she
resisted this breakdown and conquered herself.

"That is the real meaning of war, almost the worst tragedy of it" (so I
wrote at the time). "The soldier suffers less than the women and the
non-combatants. His agony perhaps is sharper, but the wound of the
spirit is hardest to bear."

So it seemed to me then, before I had seen greater ghastliness. I was
surprised also by the cheerfulness of some of our wounded soldiers.
They were the "light cases," and had the pluck to laugh at their pain.
Yet even they had had a dreadful time. It is almost true to say that the
only rest they had was when they were carried into the ambulance
cart or the field-hospital. The incessant marching, forwards and
backwards, to new positions in the blazing sun was more awful to
bear than the actual fighting under the hideous fire of the German
guns. They were kept on the move constantly, except for the briefest
lulls--when officers and men dropped, like brown leaves from autumn
trees, on each side of the road, so utterly exhausted that they were
almost senseless, and had to be dragged up out of their short sleep
when once again they tramped on to a new line, to scratch up a few
earthworks, to fire a few rounds before the bugle sounded the cease
fire and another strategical retirement.


6


On September 2 the Germans had reached Creil and Senlis--staining
their honour in these two places by unnecessary cruelty--and were no
further than thirty miles from Paris, so that the shock of their guns
might be heard as vague vibrations in the capital.

To the population of Paris, and to all civilians in France, it seemed a
stupendous disaster, this rapid incredible advance of that great
military machine of death which nothing, so far, had been able to
stop--not even the unflinching courage and the utter recklessness of
life with which the Allies flung themselves against it. Yet with an
optimism which I could hardly justify, I, who had seen the soldiers of
France, was still confident that, so far from all being lost, there was
hope of victory which might turn the German advance.

I had seen the superb courage of French regiments rushing up to
support their left wing, and the magnificent confidence of men who
after the horrors of the battlefields, and with the full consciousness
that they were always retiring, still, said: "We shall win. We are
leading the enemy to its destruction. In a little while they will be in a
death-trap from which there is no escape for them."

"This spirit," I wrote in my dispatch, "must win in the end. It is
impossible that it should be beaten in the long run. And the splendour
of this French courage, in the face of what looks like defeat, is
equalled at least by the calm and dogged assurance of our English
troops."

They repeated the same words to me over and over again--those
wounded men, those outposts at points of peril, those battalions who
went marching on to another fight, without sleep, without rest,
knowing the foe they had to meet.

"We are all right. You can call it a retreat if you like. But we are
retreating in good order and keeping our end up."

Retiring in good order I It had been more than that. They had retired
before a million of men swarming across the country like a vast ant-
heap on the move, with a valour that had gained for the British and
French forces a deathless glory. Such a thing has never been done
before in the history of warfare. It would have seemed incredible and
impossible to military experts, who know the meaning of such fighting,
and the frightful difficulty of keeping an army together in such
circumstances.


7


When I escaped from Amiens before the tunnel was broken up and
the Germans entered into possession of the town--on August 28--the
front of the allied armies was in a crescent from Abbeville by the
wooded heights south of Amiens, and thence in an irregular line to
the south of Mézières. The British forces under Sir John French were
on the left centre, supporting the heavy thrust forward of the German
right wing.

On Saturday afternoon fighting was resumed along the whole line.
The German vanguard had by this time been supported by fresh
army corps, which had been brought from Belgium. At least a million
men were on the move, pressing upon the allied forces with a ferocity
of attack which has never been equalled. Their cavalry swept across
a great tract of country, squadron by squadron, like the mounted
hordes of Attila, but armed with the deadly weapons of modern
warfare. Their artillery was in enormous numbers, and their columns
advanced under the cover of it, not like an army but rather like a
moving nation. It did not move, however, with equal pressure at all
parts of the line. It formed itself into a battering ram with a pointed
end, and this point was thrust at the heart of the English wing with its
base at St. Quentin, and advanced divisions at Péronne and Ham. It
was impossible to resist this onslaught. If the British forces had stood
against it they would have been crushed and broken. Our gunners
were magnificent, and shelled the advancing German columns so
that the dead lay heaped up along the way which was leading down
to Paris, But, as one of them told me, "It made no manner of
difference. As soon as we had smashed one lot another followed,
column after column, and by sheer weight of numbers we could do
nothing to check them."

The railway was destroyed and the bridges blown up on the main line
from Amiens to Paris, and on the branch lines from Dieppe. After this
precaution the British forces fell back, fighting all the time, as far as
Compiègne. The line of the Allies was now in the shape of a V, the
Germans thrusting their main attack deep into the angle.

General d'Amade, the most popular of French generals owing to his
exploits in Morocco, had established his staff at Aumale, holding the
extreme left of the allied armies. Some of his reserves held the hills
running east and west at Beau vais, and they were in touch with Sir
John French's cavalry along the road to Amiens.

This position remained until Monday, or rather had completed itself by
that date, the retirement of the troops being maintained with masterly
skill and without any undue haste.

Meanwhile the French troops were sustaining a terrific attack on their
centre by the German left centre, which culminated at Guise, on the
River Oise, to the north-east of St. Quentin, where the river, which
runs between beautiful meadows, was choked with corpses and red
with blood.

From an eye-witness of this great battle who escaped with a slight
wound--an officer of an infantry regiment--I learned that the German
onslaught had been repelled by the work of the French gunners,
followed by a series of bayonet and cavalry charges.

"The Germans," he said, "had the élite of their army engaged against
us, including the 10th Army Corps and the Imperial Guard. But the
heroism of our troops was sublime. Every man knew that the safety
of France depended upon him, and was ready to sacrifice his life, if
need be, with a joyful enthusiasm. They not only resisted the enemy's
attack but took the offensive, and, in spite of their overpowering
numbers, gave them a tremendous punishment. They had to recoil
before our guns, which swept their ranks, and their columns were
broken and routed. Hundreds of them were bayoneted, and hundreds
more hurled into the river, while the whole front of battle was outlined
by the dead and dying men whom they had to abandon. Certainly
their losses were enormous, and when I fell the German retreat was
in full swing, and for the time being we could claim a real victory."
Nevertheless the inevitable happened. Owing to the vast reserves
the enemy brought up fresh divisions, and the French were
compelled to fall back upon Laon and La Fère.

On Tuesday the German skirmishers with light artillery were coming
southwards to Beauvais, and the sound of their field guns greeted my
ears in this town, which I shall always remember with unpleasant
recollections, in spite of its old-world beauty and the loveliness of the
scene in which it is set.

Beauvais lies directly between Amiens and Paris, and it seemed to
me that it was the right place to be in order to get into touch with the
French army barring the way to the capital. As a matter of fact it
seemed to be the wrong place from all points of view.


8


I might have suspected that something was wrong by the strange
look on the face of a friendly French peasant whom I met at Gournay.
He had described to me in a very vivid way the disposition of the
French troops on the neighbouring hills who had disappeared in the
undulation below the sky-line, but when I mentioned that I was on the
way to Beauvais he suddenly raised his head and looked at me in a
queer, startled way which puzzled me. I remember that look when I
began to approach the town. Down the road came small parties of
peasants with fear in their eyes. Some of them were in farm carts,
and they shouted to tired horses and put them to a stumbling gallop.
Women with blanched faces, carrying children in their arms, trudged
along the dusty highway, and it was clear that these people were
afraid of something behind them--something in the direction of
Beauvais. There were not many of them, and when they had passed
the countryside was strangely and uncannily quiet. There was only
the sound of singing birds above the fields which were flooded with
the golden light of the setting sun.

Then I came into the town. An intense silence brooded there, among
the narrow little streets below the old Norman church--a white jewel
on the rising ground beyond. Almost every house was shuttered, with
blind eyes, but here and there I looked through an open window into
deserted rooms. No human face returned my gaze. It was an
abandoned town, emptied of all its people, who had fled with fear in
their eyes like those peasants along the roadway.

But presently I saw a human form. It was the figure of a French
dragoon, with his carbine slung behind his back. He was standing by
the side of a number of gunpowder bags. A little further away were
groups of soldiers at work by two bridges--one over a stream and one
over a road. They were working very calmly, and I could see what
they were doing. They were mining the bridges to blow them up at a
given signal. As I went further I saw that the streets were strewn with
broken bottles and littered with wire entanglements, very artfully and
carefully made.

It was a queer experience. It was obvious that there was a very grim
business being done in Beauvais, and that the soldiers were waiting
for something to happen. At the railway station I quickly learnt the
truth. The Germans were only a few miles away in great force. At any
moment they might come down, smashing everything in their way,
and killing every human being along that road. The station master, a
brave old type, and one or two porters, had determined to stay on to
the last. "Nous sommes ici," he said, as though the Germans would
have to reckon with him. But he was emphatic in his request for me to
leave Beauvais if another train could be got away, which was very
uncertain. As a matter of fact, after a mauvais quart d'heure, I was
put into a train which had been shunted into a siding and left
Beauvais with the sound of the German guns in my ears.

Sitting in darkness and shaken like peas in a pod because of
defective brakes, we skirted the German army, and by a twist in the
line almost ran into the enemy's country; but we rushed through the
night, and the engine-driver laughed and put his oily hand up to the
salute when I stepped out to the platform of an unknown station.

"The Germans won't have us for dinner after all," he said. "It was a
little risky all the same!"


9


The station was Creil, the headquarters, at that time, of the British
forces. It was crowded with French soldiers, and they were soon
telling me their experience of the hard fighting in which they had been
engaged.

They were dirty, unshaven, dusty from head to foot, scorched by the
heat of the August sun, in tattered uniforms, and broken boots. But
they were beautiful men for all their dirt; and the laughing courage,
the quiet confidence, the un-bragging simplicity with which they
assured me that the Germans would soon be caught in a death-trap
and sent to their destruction, filled me with an admiration which I
cannot express in words. All the odds were against them; they had
fought the hardest of all actions along the way of retreat; they knew
and told me that the enemy were fighting at Senlis, within ten miles of
the Parisian fortifications, but they had an absolute faith in the
ultimate success of their allied arms.

One of the French soldiers gave me his diary to read. In spite of his
dirty uniform, his brown unwashed hands and the blond unkempt
beard which disguised fine features and a delicate mouth, it was clear
to see that he was a man of good breeding and education.

"It may amuse you," he said. "You see, I have been busy as a
destroyer."

It was a record of the blowing up of bridges, and the words had been
scribbled into a small note-book on the way of retreat. In its brevity
this narrative of a sergeant of sappers is more eloquent than long
descriptions in polished prose. One passage in it seemed to me
almost incredible; the lines which tell of a German aviator who took a
tiny child with him on his mission of death. But a man like this, whose
steel-blue eyes looked into mine with such fine frankness, would not
put a lie into his note-book, and I believed him. I reproduce the
document now as I copied it away from the gaze of a French officer
who suspected this breach of regulations:

August 25. Started for St. Quentin and arrived in evening. Our section
set out again next morning for a point twelve kilometres behind, at
Montescourt-Lezeroulles, in order to mine a bridge. We worked all the
night and returned to St. Quentin, where we did reconnaissance
work.

August 27. Germans signalled and station of St. Quentin evacuated.

We were directed to maintain order among the crowd who wished to
go away. It was a very sad spectacle, all the women and children
weeping and not enough trains to save them.

At last we go away, and destroy line and station of Essigny-le-Grand
and at Montescourt, where we destroy bridge already mined.

Arrive in afternoon at Tergnier. Sleep there, and set out on afternoon
of 28th for Chauny and Noyon.

August 29 (morning). We receive order to go back to Tergnier, the
Germans having succeeded in piercing British lines. We pass
Montescourt, and arrive Jussy, where the bridge of the canal being
blown up, we hold up Germans momentarily. Coming from Tergnier,
we were ordered to destroy bridges and stations of the line, which is
main line to Paris.

Work in the evening to sound of cannon. It is pitiable to see the
miserable people on the road with their boxes and children.

In the afternoon set out for Chauny, in direction of Compiègne, where
we arrive in the evening. All along the line were scattered the poor
people. We have twelve on our waggon, and let them eat our food.
We had our own provisions, and we gave them to these people.

August 30 (Sunday). Stationed at Compiègne awaiting orders. One
hears more clearly the sound of the cannon. After the news this
morning I write a line. It appears that the Germans have been
destroyed at St. Quentin.

To-day we have assisted at a duel between a biplane and an
aeroplane. I had nearest me the German aeroplane, which fell in the
English lines. The officer in charge with it had with him a child of six
years old, who was also a German. They were only wounded.

After St. Quentin were with the English troops under the orders of the
English Headquarters Staff.

The rumours which tell of German defeats must be false, because
the English troops retire, and we evacuate Longuart, where we
destroy the station and the railway lines.


10


The retreat of the British army--it is amazing to think that there were
only 45,000 men who had tried to stem the German avalanche--was
developing into a run. Only some wild fluke of chance (the pious
patriot sees God's hand at work, while the cynic sees only the
inefficiency of the German Staff) saved it from becoming a bloody
rout. It is too soon even now to write the details of it. Only when
scores of officers have written their reminiscences shall we have the
full story of those last days of August, when a little army which was
exhausted after many battles staggered hard away from the menace
of enormous odds seeking to envelop it. It was called a "retirement in
good order." It was hardly that when the Commander-in-Chief had to
make a hurried flight with a mounted escort, when the Adjutant-
General's department, busy in the château of a French village,
suddenly awakened to the knowledge that it had been forgotten and
left behind (I heard a personal story of the escape that followed the
awakening), and when companies, battalions, and regiments lost
touch with each other, were bewildered in dark woods and unknown
roads, and were shelled unexpectedly by an enemy of whose
whereabouts they had now no definite knowledge. The German net of
iron was drawing tighter. In a few hours it might close round and
make escape impossible. General Allenby's division of cavalry had a
gallop for life, when the outposts came in with reports of a great
encircling movement of German horse, so that there was not a
moment to lose if a great disaster were to be averted. It was Allenby
himself who led his retreat at the head of his division by the side of a
French guide carrying a lantern.

For twenty miles our cavalry urged on their tired horses through the
night, and along the sides of the roads came a struggling mass of
automobiles, motor-cycles, and motor-wagons, carrying engineers,
telegraphists and men of the Army Service Corps. Ambulances
crammed with wounded who had been picked up hurriedly from the
churches and barns which had been used as hospitals, joined the
stampede, and for many poor lads whose heads had been broken by
the German shells and whose flesh was on fire with frightful wounds,
this night-ride was a highway of torture which ended in eternal rest.

All the way the cavalry and the convoys were followed by the enemy,
and there were moments when it seemed inevitable that the strength
of the horses would give out and that the retreating force would be
surrounded. But as we know now, the enemy was exhausted also.
Their pursuit was a chase by blown horses and puffed men. They
called a halt and breathed heavily, at the very time when a last gallop
and a hard fight would have given them their prize--the flower of the
British army.

On that last stage of the retreat we lost less men than any text-book
of war would have given as a credible number in such conditions.
Many who were wounded as they tramped through woods splintered
by bursting shells and ripped with bullets, bandaged themselves as
best they could and limped on, or were carried by loyal comrades
who would not leave a pal in the lurch. Others who lost their way or
lay down in sheer exhaustion, cursing the Germans and not caring if
they came, straggled back later--weeks later--by devious routes to
Rouen or Paris, after a wandering life in French villages, where the
peasants fed them and nursed them so that they were in no hurry to
leave. It was the time when the temptation to desert seized men with
a devilish attraction. They had escaped from such hells at Charleroi
and Cambrai and Le Cateau. Boys who had never heard the roar of
guns before except in mimic warfare had crouched and cowered
beneath a tempest of shells, waiting, terrified, for death. Death had
not touched them. By some miracle they had dodged it, with dead
men horribly mutilated on either side of them, so that blood had
slopped about their feet and they had jerked back from shapeless
masses of flesh--of men or horses--sick with the stench of it, cold
with the horror of it. Was it any wonder that some of these young men
who had laughed on the way to Waterloo Station, and held their
heads high in the admiring gaze of London crowds, sure of their own
heroism, slunk now in the backyards of French farmhouses, hid
behind hedges when men in khaki passed, and told wild, incoherent
tales, when cornered at last by some cold-eyed officer in some town
of France to which they had blundered? It was the coward's chance,
and I for one can hardly bring myself to blame the poor devil I met
one day in Rouen, stuttering out lies, to save his skin, or the two
gunners, disguised in civil clothes, who begged from me near
Amiens, or any of the half-starved stragglers who had "lost" their
regiments and did not go to find them. Some of them were shot and
deserved their fate, according to the rules of war and the stern justice
of men who know no fear. But in this war there are not many men
who have not known moments of cold terror, when all their pride of
manhood oozed away and left them cowards, sick with horror at all
the frightfulness. Out of such knowledge pity comes.

It was pity and a sense of impending tragedy which took hold of me in
Creil and on the way to Paris when I was confronted with the
confusion of the British retreat, and, what seemed its inevitable
consequences, the siege and fall of the French capital.


11


I reached Paris in the middle of the night on September 2 and saw
extraordinary scenes. It had become known during the day that
German outposts had reached Senlis and Chantilly, and that Paris
was no longer the seat of Government. Quietly and without a word of
warning the French Ministry had stolen away, after a Cabinet meeting
at which there had been both rage and tears, and after a frantic
packing up of papers in Government offices. This abandonment
came as a paralysing shock to the citizens of Paris and was an
outward and visible sign that the worst thing might happen--a new
siege of Paris, with greater guns than those which girdled it in the
terrible year.

A rumour had come that the people were to be given five days' notice
to leave their houses within the zone of fortifications, and to add to
the menace of impending horrors an aeroplane had dropped bombs
upon the Gare de l'Est that afternoon. There was a wild rush to get
away from the capital, and the railway stations were great camps of
fugitives, in which the richest and the poorest citizens were mingled,
with their women and children. The tragedy deepened when it was
heard that most of the lines to the coast had been cut and that the
only remaining line to Dieppe would probably be destroyed during the
next few hours. From the crowds which had been waiting all day for a
chance to get to the guichets in the rear of other and greater crowds,
there rose a murmur which seemed to me like a great sigh from
stricken hearts. There were many old men and women there who
knew what a siege of Paris meant. To younger people they told the
tale of it now--the old familiar tale--with shaking heads and trembling
forefingers. "Starvation!" "We ate rats, if we were lucky." "They would
not hesitate to smash up Notre Dame." "It is not for my sake I would
go. But the little ones! Those poor innocents!"

They did not make much noise in those crowds. There was no loud
sound of panic. No woman's voice shrieked or wailed above the
murmurs of voices. There was no fighting for the station platforms
barred against them all. A few women wept quietly, mopping their
eyes. Perhaps they wept for sheer weariness after sitting encamped
for hours on their baggage. Most of the men had a haggard look and
kept repeating the stale old word, "Incroyable!" in a dazed and dismal
way. Sadness as well as fear was revealed in the spirit of those
fugitives, a sadness that Paris, Paris the beautiful, should be in
danger of destruction, and that all her hopes of victory had ended in
this defeat.

Among all these civilians were soldiers of many regiments and of two
nations--Turcos and Zouaves, chasseurs and infantry, regulars and
Highland British. Many of these were wounded and lay on the floor
among the crying babies and weary-eyed women. Many of them were
drinking and drunk. They clinked glasses and pledged each other in
French and English and broadest Scotch, with a "Hell to the Kaiser!"
and "à bas Guillaume!" A Tommy with the accent of the Fulham Road
stood on a chair, steadying himself by a firm grasp on the shoulder of
a French dragon, and made an incoherent speech in which he reviled
the French troops as dirty dogs who ran away like mongrels, vowed
that he would never have left England for such a bloody game if he
had known the rights of it, and hoped Kitchener would break his
blooming neck down the area of Buckingham Palace. The French
soldier greeted these sentiments with a "Bravo, mon vieux!" not
understanding a word of them, and the drunkard swayed and fell
across the marble-topped table, amid a crash of broken glass.

"Serve him damn well right!" said a sergeant to whom I had been
talking. Like many other English soldiers here who had been fighting
for ten days in retreat, he had kept his head, and his heart.

"We've been at it night and day," he said. "The only rest from fighting
was when we were marching with the beggars after us."

He spoke of the German army as "a blighted nation on the move."

"You can't mow that down. We kill 'em and kill 'em, and still they
come on. They seem to have an endless line of fresh men. Directly
we check 'em in one attack a fresh attack develops. It's impossible to
hold up such a mass of men. Can't be done, nohow!"

This man, severely wounded, was so much master of himself, so
strong in common sense that he was able to get the right perspective
about the general situation.

"It's not right to say we've met with disaster," he remarked. "Truth's
truth. We've suffered pretty badly--perhaps twelve per cent, of a
battalion knocked out. But what's that? You've got to expect it
nowadays. 'Taint a picnic. Besides, what if a battalion was cut up--
wiped clean out, if you like? That don't mean defeat. While one
regiment suffered another got off light."

And by the words of that sergeant of the Essex Regiment I was
helped to see the truth of what had happened. He took the same
view as many officers and men to whom I had spoken, and by
weighing up the evidence, in the light of all that I had seen and heard,
and with the assistance of my friend the Philosopher--whose wisdom
shone bright after a glass of Dubonnet and the arsenic pill which lifted
him out of the gulfs of the black devil doubt to heights of splendid
optimism based upon unerring logic--I was able to send a dispatch to
England which cheered it after a day of anguish.


12


Because I also was eager to reach the coast--not to escape from the
advancing Germans, for I had determined that I would do desperate
things to get back for the siege of Paris, if history had to be written
that way--but because I must find a boat to carry a dispatch across
the Channel, I waited with the crowd of fugitives, struggled with them
for a seat in the train which left at dawn and endured another of those
journeys when discomfort mocked at sleep, until sheer exhaustion
made one doze for a minute of unconsciousness from which one
awakened with a cricked neck and cramped limbs, to a reality of
tragic things.

We went by a tortuous route, round Paris towards the west, and at
every station the carriages were besieged by people trying to escape.

"Pour l'amour de Dieu, laissez-moi entrer!"

"J'ai trois enfants, messieurs! Ayez un peu de pitié!" "Cré nom de
Dieu, c'est le dernier train! Et j'ai peur pour les petits. Nous sommes
tous dans le même cas, n'est-ce-pas?"

But entreaties, piteous words, the exhibition of frightened children and
wailing babes could not make a place in carriages already packed to
bursting-point. It was impossible to get one more human being inside.

"C'est impossible! C'est absolument impossible! Regardez! On ne
peut pas faire plus de place, Madame!"

I was tempted sometimes to yield up my place. It seemed a coward
thing to sit there jammed between two peasants while a white-faced
woman with a child in her arms begged for a little pity and--a little
room. But I had a message for the English people. They, too, were in
anguish because the enemy had come so close to Paris in pursuit of
a little army which seemed to have been wiped out behind the screen
of secrecy through which only vague and awful rumours came. I sat
still, shamefaced, scribbling my message hour after hour, not daring
to look in the face of those women who turned away in a kind of
sullen sadness after their pitiful entreaties.

Enormous herds of cattle were being driven into Paris. For miles the
roads were thronged with them, and down other roads away from
Paris families were trekking to far fields, with their household goods
piled into bullock carts, pony carts, and wheelbarrows.

At Pontoise there was another shock, for people whose nerves were
frayed by fright. Two batteries of artillery were stationed by the line,
and a regiment of infantry was hiding in the hollows of the grass
slopes. Out of a nightmare dream not more fantastic than my waking
hours so that there seemed no dividing line between illusion and
reality, I opened my eyes to see those faces in the grass, bronzed
bearded faces with anxious eyes, below a hedge of rifle barrels
slanted towards the north. The Philosopher had jerked out of slumber
into a wakefulness like mine. He rubbed his eyes and then sat bolt
upright, with a tense searching look, as though trying to pierce to the
truth of things by a violence of staring.

"It doesn't look good," he said. "Those chaps in the grass seem to
expect something--something nasty!"

The Strategist had a map on his knees, which overlapped his fellow
passenger's on either side.

"If the beggars cut the line here it closes the way of escape from
Paris. It would be good business from their point of view."

I was sorry my message to .the English people might never be read
by them. Perhaps after all they would get on very well without it, and
my paper would appoint another correspondent to succeed a man
swallowed up somewhere inside the German lines. It would be a
queer adventure. I conjured up an imaginary conversation in bad
German with an officer in a pointed casque. Undoubtedly he would
have the best of the argument. There would be a little white wall,
perhaps...

One of the enemy's aeroplanes flew above our heads, circled round
and then disappeared. It dropped no bombs and was satisfied with its
reconnaissance. The whistle of the train shrieked out, and there was
a cheer from the French gunners as we went away to safety, leaving
them behind at the post of peril.

After all my message went to Fleet Street and filled a number of
columns, read over the coffee cups by a number of English families,
who said perhaps: "I wonder if he really knows anything, or if it is all
made up. Those newspaper men..."

Those newspaper men did not get much rest in their quest for truth,
not caring much, if the truth may be told, for what the English public
chose to think or not to think, but eager to see more of the great
drama and to plunge again into its amazing vortex.

Almost before the fugitives who had come with us had found time to
smell the sea we were back again along the road to Paris, fretful to be
there before it was closed by a hostile army and a ring of fire.


13


There are people who say that Paris showed no sign of panic when
the Germans were at their gates. "The calmness with which Paris
awaits the siege is amazing," wrote one of my confrères, and he
added this phrase: "There is no sign of panic." He was right if by
panic one meant a noisy fear, of crowds rushing wildly about tearing
out handfuls of their hair, and shrieking in a delirium of terror. No,
there was no clamour of despair in Paris when the enemy came close
to its gates. But if by panic one may mean a great fear spreading
rapidly among great multitudes of people, infectious as a fell disease
so that men ordinarily brave felt gripped with a sudden chill at the
heart, and searched desperately for a way of escape from the
advancing peril, then Paris was panic-stricken.

I have written many words about the courage of Paris, courage as
fine and noble as anything in history, and in a later chapter of this
book I hope to reveal the strength as well as the weakness in the soul
of Paris. But if there is any truth in my pen it must describe that
exodus by one and a half millions of people who, under the impulse of
a great fear--what else was it?--fled by any means and any road from
the capital which they love better than any city in the world because
their homes are there and their pride and all that has given beauty to
their ideals.

In those few days before the menace passed the railway stations
were stormed and stormed again, throughout the day and night, by
enormous crowds such as I had seen on that night of September 2.
Because so many bridges had been blown up and so many lines cut
on the way to Calais and Boulogne, in order to hamper the enemy's
advance, and because what had remained were being used for the
transport of troops, it was utterly impossible to provide trains for these
people. Southwards the way was easier, though from that direction
also regiments of French soldiers were being rushed up to the danger
zone. The railway officials under the pressure of this tremendous
strain, did their best to hurl out the population of Paris, somehow and
anyhow. For military reasons the need was urgent, The less mouths
to feed the better in a besieged city. So when all the passenger trains
had been used, cattle trucks were put together and into them,
thanking God, tumbled fine ladies of France, careless of the filth
which stained their silk frocks, and rich Americans who had travelled
far to Paris for the sake of safety, who offered great bribes to any
man who would yield his place between wooden boards for a way out
again, and bourgeois families who had shut up shops from the Rue
de la Paix to the Place Pigalle, heedless for once of loss or ruin, but
desperate to get beyond the range of German shells and the horrors
of a beleaguered city.

There were tragic individuals in these crowds. I could only guess at
some of their stories as they were written in lines of pain about the
eyes and mouths of poor old spinsters such as Balzac met hiding
their misery in backstairs flats of Paris tenements--they came blinking
out into the fierce sunlight of the Paris streets like captive creatures
let loose by an earthquake--and of young students who had
eschewed delight and lived laborious days for knowledge and art
which had been overthrown by war's brutality. All classes and types of
life in Paris were mixed up in this retreat, and among them were men
I knew, so that I needed no guesswork for their stories. For weeks
some of them had been working under nervous pressure, keeping "a
stiff upper lip" as it is called to all rumours of impending tragedy. But
the contagion of fear had caught them in a secret way, and suddenly
their nerves had snapped, and they too had abandoned courage and
ideals of duty, slinking, as though afraid of daylight, to stations more
closely sieged than Paris would be. Pitiful wrecks of men, and victims
of this ruthless war in which the non-combatants have suffered even
more sometimes than the fighting men. The neuroticism of the age
was exaggerated by writing men--we have seen the spirit of the old
blood strong and keen--but neurasthenia is not a myth, and God
knows it was found out and made a torture to many men and women
in the city of Paris, when the Great Fear came--closing in with a
narrowing circle until it seemed to clutch at the throats of those
miserable beings.

There were thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who
would not wait for the trains. Along the southern road which goes
down to Tours there were sixty unbroken miles of them. They went in
every kind of vehicle--taxi-cabs for which rich people had paid
fabulous prices, motor-cars which had escaped the military
requisition, farmers' carts laden with several families and piles of
household goods, shop carts drawn by horses already tired to the
point of death, because of the weight of the people who had crowded
behind, pony traps, governess carts, and innumerable cycles.

But for the most part the people were on foot, and they trudged along,
bravely at first, quite gay, some of them, on the first stage of the
march; mothers carrying their babies, fathers hoisting children to their
shoulders, families stepping out together. They were of all classes,
rank and fortune being annihilated by this common tragedy. Elegant
women, whose beauty is known in the Paris salons, whose frivolity
perhaps in the past was the main purpose of their lives, were now on
a level with the peasant mothers of the French suburbs, and with the
midinettes of Montmartre--and their courage did not fail them so
quickly.

It was a tragic road. At every mile of it there were people who had
fainted on the wayside, and poor old people who could go no further
but sat down on the banks below the hedges weeping silently or
bidding the younger ones go forward and leave them to their fate.

Young women who h

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/11682