The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs

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?

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. Honore, 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!”

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?

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 Poincare, 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.

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.”

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?

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!”

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 Liege, 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.

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.

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.

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 kepis 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?”

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.

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, Armentieres, and from scores of villages further south which had seemed utterly safe and aloof from hostile armies which, with faith in official communiques 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 Liege! 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.

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

Ominous things were happening behind the screen. Good God! was France to see another annee 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 communiques 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 Armentieres, 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.

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 a 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.

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-Meme. While the Germans were smashing their way through Belgium, checked only a little while at Liege 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 chateaux 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.

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 Mezieres, 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 Mezieres. 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.

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.

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.

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 Mezieres. 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 Peronne 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 Compiegne. 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 elite 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 Fere.

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.

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!”

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 Compiegne, 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 Compiegne 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.

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 chateau 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.

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 “a 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.

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 pitie!” “Cre nom de Dieu, c’est le dernier train! Et j’ai peur pour les petits. Nous sommes tous dans le meme 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.

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 confreres, 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 had stepped out so jauntily at first were footsore and lame, so that they limped along with lines of pain about their lips and eyes. Many of the taxi-cabs, bought at great prices, and many of the motor-cars had broken down and had been abandoned by their owners, who had decided to walk.

Farmers’ carts had jolted into ditches and had lost their wheels. Wheelbarrows, too heavy to trundle, had been tilted up, with all their household goods spilt into the roadway, and the children had been carried further, until at last darkness came, and their only shelter was a haystack in a field under the harvest moon.

I entered Paris again from the south-west, after crossing the Seine where it makes a loop to the north-west beyond the forts of St. Germain and St. Denis. The way seemed open to the enemy. Always obsessed with the idea that the Germans would come from the east– the almost fatal error of the French General Staff, Paris had been girdled with forts on that side, from those of Ecouen and Montmorency by the distant ramparts of Chelles and Champigny to those of Sucy and Villeneuve–the outer lines of a triple cordon. But on the western side there was next to nothing, and it was a sign to me of the utter unreadiness of France that now at the eleventh hour when I passed thousands of men were digging trenches in the roads and fields with frantic haste, and throwing up earthworks along the banks of the Seine. Great God! that such work should not have been done weeks before and not left like this to a day when the enemy’s guns were rumbling through Creil and smashing back the allied armies in retreat!

It was a pitiful thing to see the deserted houses of the Paris suburbs. It was as though a plague had killed every human being save those who had fled in frantic haste. Those little villas on the riverside, so coquette in their prettiness, built as love nests and summer-houses, were all shuttered and silent Roses were blowing in their gardens, full- blown because no woman’s hand had been to pick them, and spilling their petals on the garden paths. The creeper was crimsoning on the walls and the grass plots were like velvet carpeting, so soft and deeply green. But there were signs of disorder, of some hurried transmigration. Packing-cases littered the trim lawns and cardboard boxes had been flung about. In one small bower I saw a child’s perambulator, where two wax dolls sat staring up at the abandoned house. Their faces had become blotchy in the dew of night, and their little maman with her pigtail had left them to their fate. In another garden a woman’s parasol and flower-trimmed hat lay on a rustic seat with an open book beside them. I imagined a lady of France called suddenly away from an old romance of false sentiment by the visit of grim reality–the first sound of the enemy’s guns, faint but terrible to startled ears.

“Les Allemands sont tout pres!”

Some harsh voice had broken into the quietude of the garden on the Seine, and the open book, with the sunshade and the hat, had been forgotten in the flight.

Yet there was one human figure here on the banks of the Seine reassuring in this solitude which was haunted by the shadow of fear. It was a fisherman. A middle-aged man with a straw hat on the back of his head and a big pair of spectacles on the end of his nose, he held out his long rod with a steady hand and waited for a bite, in an attitude of supreme indifference to Germans, guns, hatred, tears and all the miserable stupidities of people who do not fish. He was at peace with the world on this day of splendour, with a golden sun and a blue sky, and black shadows flung across the water from the tree trunks. He stood there, a simple fisherman, as a protest against the failure of civilization and the cowardice in the hearts of men. I lifted my hat to him.

Close to Paris, too, in little market gardens and poor plots of land, women stooped over their cabbages, and old men tended the fruits of the earth. On one patch a peasant girl stood with her hands on her hips staring at her fowls, which were struggling and clucking for the grain she had flung down to them. There was a smile about her lips. She seemed absorbed in the contemplation of the feathered crowd. Did she know the Germans were coming to Paris? If so, she was not afraid.

How quiet it was in the great city! How strangely and deadly quiet! The heels of my two companions, and my own, made a click-clack down the pavements, as though we were walking through silent halls. Could this be Paris–this city of shuttered shops and barred windows and deserted avenues? There were no treasures displayed in the Rue de la Paix. Not a diamond glinted behind the window panes. Indeed, there were no windows visible, but only iron sheeting, drawn down like the lids of dead men’s eyes.

In the Avenue de l’Opera no Teutonic tout approached us with the old familiar words, “Want a guide, sir?” “Lovely ladies, sir!” The lovely ladies had gone. The guides had gone. Life had gone out of Paris.

It was early in the morning, and we were faint for lack of sleep and food.

“My kingdom for a carriage,” said the Philosopher, in a voice that seemed to come from the virgin forests of the Madeira in which he had once lost hold of all familiar things in life, as now in Paris.

A very old cab crawled into view, with a knock-kneed horse which staggered aimlessly about the empty streets, and with an old cocher who looked about him as though doubtful as to his whereabouts in this deserted city.

He started violently when we hailed him, and stared at us as nightmare creatures in a bad dream after an absinthe orgy. I had to repeat an address three times before he understood.

“Hotel St. James… Ecoutez donc, mon vieux!”

He clacked his whip with an awakening to life.

“Allez!” he shouted to his bag of bones.

Our arrival at the Hotel St. James was a sensation, not without alarm. I believe the concierge and his wife believed the Germans had come when they heard the outrageous noise of our horse’s hoofs thundering into the awful silence of their courtyard. The manager, and the assistant manager, and the head waiter, and the head waiter’s wife, and the chambermaid, and the cook, greeted us with the surprise of people who behold an apparition.

“The hotel has shut up. Everybody has fled! We are quite alone here!”

I was glad to have added a little item of history to that old mansion where the Duc de Noailles lived, where Lafayette was married, and where Marie Antoinette saw old ghost faces–the dead faces of laughing girls–when she passed on her way to the scaffold. It was a queer incident in its story when three English journalists opened it after the great flight from Paris.

Early that morning, after a snatch of sleep, we three friends walked up the Avenue des Champs Elysees and back again from the Arc de Triomphe. The autumn foliage was beginning to fall, and so wonderfully quiet was the scene that almost one might have heard a leaf rustle to the ground. Not a child scampered under the trees or chased a comrade round the Petit Guignol. No women with twinkling needles sat on the stone seats. No black-haired student fondled the hand of a pretty couturiere. No honest bourgeois with a fat stomach walked slowly along the pathway meditating upon the mystery of life which made some men millionaires. Not a single carriage nor any kind of vehicle, except one solitary bicycle, came down the road where on normal days there is a crowd of light-wheeled traffic.

The Philosopher was silent, thinking tremendous things, with his sallow face transfigured by some spiritual emotion. It was when we passed the Palais des Beaux-Arts that he stood still and raised two fingers to the blue sky, like a priest blessing a kneeling multitude.

“Thanks be to the Great Power!” he said, with the solemn piety of an infidel who knows God only as the spirit is revealed on lonely waters and above uprising seas, and in the life of flowers and beasts, and in the rare pity of men.

We did not laugh at him. Only those who have known Paris and loved her beauty can understand the thrill that came to us on that morning in September when we had expected to hear the roar of great guns around her, and to see the beginning of a ghastly destruction. Paris was still safe! By some kind of miracle the enemy had not yet touched her beauty nor tramped into her streets. How sharp and clear were all the buildings under that cloudless sky! Spears of light flashed from the brazen-winged horses above Alexander’s bridge, and the dome of the Invalides was a golden crown above a snow-white palace. The Seine poured in a burnished stream beneath all the bridges and far away beyond the houses and the island trees, and all the picture of Paris etched by a master-hand through long centuries of time the towers of Notre Dame were faintly pencilled in the blue screen of sky. Oh, fair dream-city, in which the highest passions of the spirit have found a dwelling-place–with the rankest weeds of vice–in which so many human hearts have suffered and strived and starved for beauty’s sake, in which always there have lived laughter and agony and tears, where Liberty was cherished as well as murdered, and where Love has redeemed a thousand crimes, I, though an Englishman, found tears in my eyes because on that day of history your beauty was still unspoilt.

Chapter V
The Turn Of The Tide

The Germans were baulked of Paris. Even now, looking back on those days, I sometimes wonder why they made that sudden swerve to the south-east, missing their great objective. It was for Paris that they had fought their way westwards and southwards through an incessant battlefield from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens, and down to Creil and Compiegne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for the death-pits. The prize of Paris– Paris the great and beautiful–seemed to be within their grasp, and the news of its fall would come as a thunderstroke of fate to the French and British peoples, reverberating eastwards to Russia as a dread proof of German power.

As I have said, all the north-west corner of France was denuded of troops, with the exception of some poor Territorials, ill-trained and ill- equipped, and never meant to withstand the crush of Imperial troops advancing in hordes with masses of artillery, so that they fled like panic-stricken sheep. The forts of Paris on the western side would not have held out for half a day against the German guns. All that feverish activity of trench work was but a pitiable exhibition of an unprepared defence. The enemy would have swept over them like a rolling tide. The little British army was still holding together, but it had lost heavily and was winded after its rapid retreat. The army of Paris was waiting to fight and would have fought to the death, but without support from other army corps still a day’s journey distant, its peril would have been great, and if the enemy’s right wing had been hurled with full force against it at the critical moment it might have been crushed and annihilated. Von Kluck had twenty-four hours in his favour. If he had been swift to use them before Joffre could have hurried up his regiments to the rescue, German boots might have tramped down through the Place de la Republique to the Place de la Concorde, and German horses might have been stabled in the Palais des Beaux-Arts. I am sure of that, because I saw the beginning of demoralization, the first signs of an enormous tragedy, creeping closer to an expectant city.

In spite of the optimism of French officers and men, an optimism as strong as religious faith, I believe now, searching back to facts, that it was not justified by the military situation. It was justified only by the miracle that followed faith. Von Kluck does not seem to have known that the French army was in desperate need of those twenty-four hours which he gave them by his hesitation. If he had come straight on for Paris with the same rapidity as his men had marched in earlier stages and with the same resolve to smash through regardless of cost, the city would have been his and France would have reeled under the blow. The psychological effect of the capital being in the enemy’s hands would have been worth more to them at this stage of the war than the annihilation of an army corps. It would have been a moral debacle for the French people, who had been buoyed up with false news and false hopes until their Government had fled to Bordeaux, realizing the gravity of the peril. The Terrible Year would have seemed no worse than this swift invasion of Paris, and the temperament of the nation, in spite of the renewal of its youth, had not changed enough to resist this calamity with utter stoicism. I know the arguments of the strategists, who point out that Von Kluck could not afford to undertake the risk of entering Paris while an undefeated army remained on his flank. They are obvious arguments, thoroughly sound to men who play for safety, but all records of great captains of war prove that at a decisive moment they abandon the safe and obvious game for a master-stroke of audacity, counting the risks and taking them, and striking terror into the hearts of their enemy by the very shock of their contempt for caution. Von Kluck could have entered and held Paris with twenty thousand men. That seems to me beyond dispute by anyone who knows the facts. With the mass of men at his disposal he could have driven a wedge between Paris and the French armies of the left and centre, and any attempt on their part to pierce his line and cut his communications would have been hampered by the deadly peril of finding themselves outflanked by the German centre swinging down from the north in a western curve, with its point directed also upon Paris. The whole aspect of the war would have been changed, and there would have been great strategical movements perilous to both sides, instead of the siege war of the trenches in which both sides played for safety and established for many months a position bordering upon stalemate.

The psychological effect upon the German army if Paris had been taken would have been great in moral value to them as in moral loss to the French. Their spirits would have been exalted as much as the French spirits would have drooped, and even in modern war victory is secured as much by temperamental qualities as by shell-fire and big guns.

The Headquarters Staff of the German army decided otherwise. Scared by the possibility of having their left wing smashed back to the west between Paris and the sea, with their communications cut, they swung round steadily to the south-east and drove their famous wedge-like formation southwards, with the purpose of dividing the allied forces of the West from the French centre. The exact position then was this: Their own right struck down to the south-east of Paris, through Chateau Thierry to La Ferte-sous-Jouarre and beyond; and another strong column forced the French to evacuate Rheims and fall back in a south-westerly direction. It was not without skill, this sudden change of plan, and it is clear that the German Staff believed it possible to defeat the French centre and left centre and then to come back with a smashing blow against the army of Paris and the “contemptible” British. But two great factors in the case were overlooked. One was the value of time, and the other was the sudden revival in the spirit of the French army now that Paris might still be saved. They gave time–no more than that precious twenty-four hours–to General Joffre and his advisers to repair by one supreme and splendid effort all the grievous errors of the war’s first chapter. While they were hesitating and changing their line of front, a new and tremendous activity was taking place on the French side, and Joffre, by a real stroke of genius which proves him to be a great general in spite of the first mistakes, for which he was perhaps not responsible, prepared a blow which was to strike his enemy shrewdly.

I had the great fortune of seeing something of that rush to the rescue which gave hope that perhaps, after all, the tragedy which had seemed so inevitable–the capture of the world’s finest city–might not be fulfilled.

This great movement was directed from the west, the south, and the

The Soul of the War by Philip Gibbs (page 2)