"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.

13

There are people who say that Paris showed no sign of panic when the Germans were at their gates. "The calmness with which Paris awaits the siege is amazing," wrote one of my 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



1

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.

2

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 east, and continued without pause by day and night.

In stations about Paris I saw regiment after regiment entraining—men from the southern provinces speaking the patois of the south, men from the eastern departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war, at Chalons, and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre of France in the garrisons along the Loire.

They were all in splendid spirits, strangely undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance. "Fear nothing, my little one," said a dirty unshaven gentleman with the laughing eyes of d'Artagnan, "we shall bite their heads off. These brutal 'Boches' are going to put themselves in a veritable death-trap. We shall have them at last."

The railway carriages were garlanded with flowers of the fields. The men wore posies in their kepis. In white chalk they had scrawled legends upon the cattle-trucks in which they travelled. "A mort Guillaume!" "Vive la Gloire!" "Les Francais ne se rendent jamais!" Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the Vosges. The youngest of them had bristling beards. Their blue coats with the turned-back flaps were war-worn and flaked with the dust of long marches. Their red trousers were sloppy and stained.

But they had not forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their spirits was good to see. A friend of mine was not ashamed to say that he had tears at least as high as his throat when he stood among them and clasped some of those brown hands. There was a thrill not to be recaptured in the emotion of those early days of war. Afterwards the monotony of it all sat heavily upon one's soul.

They were very proud, those French soldiers, of fighting side by side with their old foes the British, now after long centuries of strife, from Edward the Black Prince to Wellington, their brothers-in-arms upon the battlefields; and because I am English they offered me their cigarettes and made me one of them.

In modern war it is only masses of men that matter, moved by a common obedience at the dictation of mysterious far-off powers, and I thanked Heaven that masses of men were on the move, rapidly, in vast numbers, and in the right direction—to support the French lines which had fallen back from Amiens a few hours before I left that town, whom I had followed in their retirement back and back, with the British always strengthening their left, but retiring with them almost to the outskirts of Paris itself.

Only this could save Paris—the rapid strengthening of the Allied front by enormous reserves strong enough to hold back the arrow-shaped battering-ram of the enemy's right.

All our British reserves had been rushed up to the front from Havre and Rouen. There was only one deduction to be drawn from this great swift movement. The French and British lines had been supported by every available battalion to save Paris from its menace of destruction, to meet the weight of the enemy's metal by a force strong enough to resist its mass.

3

One of the most dramatic incidents of the war was the transport of the army of Paris to the fighting line—in taxi-cabs. There were 2000 of these cabs in Paris, and on this day of September 1 they disappeared as though the earth had swallowed them, just as the earth had swallowed one of them not long before when the floods had sapped the streets. A sudden order from General Gallieni, the Military Governor of Paris, had been issued to each driver, who immediately ignored the upraised hands of would-be passengers and the shouts of people desperate to get to one of the railway stations with household goods and a hope of escape. At the depots the drivers knew that upon the strength of their tyres and the power of their engines depended the safety of Paris and perhaps the life of France. It was an extraordinary incident in the history of modern war. Five soldiers were loaded into each cab, four inside and one next to the driver, with their rifles and kit crammed in between them. In one journey twenty thousand men were taken on the road to Meaux. It was a triumph of mobility, and when in future the Parisian is tempted to curse those red vehicles which dash about the streets to the danger of all pedestrians who forget that death has to be dodged by never-failing vigilance, his righteous wrath will be softened, perhaps, by the remembrance that these were the chariots of General Manoury's army before the battle of Meaux, which turned the tide of war and flung back the enemy in retreat..

4

It will be to the lasting credit of General Joffre and the French Staff that after six weeks of disorder owing to the unreadiness of their army and their grievous errors in the disposition of the available troops, they recovered themselves in a supreme effort and by a brilliant stroke of strategy took the enemy completely by surprise and dealt him a staggering blow. The German Headquarters Staff—the brains of the greatest military machine in Europe—sublimely arrogant in their belief that they had an exclusive knowledge of the whole science of war and that the allied armies were poor blunderers without intelligence and without organization, utterly incapable of resisting the military genius of the German race, found themselves foiled and out- manoeuvred at the very moment when the prize of victory seemed to be within their grasp.

For the first time since the beginning of their advance into French territory they were confronted with something like equal numbers, and they were brought to a halt at once. This arrest, shocking to their self- confidence, was found to be more than a mere check easily overpowered by bringing up more battalions. General von Kluck realized that the French had gathered together a formidable mass of men ready to be flung upon his right flank. Their guns were already beginning to open fire with frightful effect upon his advanced columns. The pressure of French regiments marching steadily and swiftly from the south-east and south-west after weeks of retirement, was forcing in his outposts, chasing back his cavalry and revealing a strong and resolute offensive. On September 4 and 5 there was heavy fighting on the German left and centre, to the south of the Marne and the west of the Ourcq. While General von Kluck was endeavouring to resist the thrust of the French and British troops who were massing their guns with great strength on his right, General von Bulow's left wing, with the Saxon army and the Prince of Wurtemberg's army, made desperate attempts to break the French centre by violent attacks to the north of Sezanne and Vitry-le- Francois. For two days the Germans tested the full measure of the strength opposed to them, but failed in smashing through any part of the French line, so that the Allies, successful in holding their ground against the full weight of the enemy, gained time for the supports to reach them and then developed a complete and general attack.

Von Kluck found that his troops were yielding. The French mordant was too much for Prussians as well as Saxons, who in many villages of France and in the hollows of the downs were heavily punished by the Anglo-French artillery, and routed by bayonet charges thrust home with incredible ferocity. The German Headquarters Staff, receiving these reports from all parts of the line, must have had many moral shocks, undermining their pride and racking their nerves. Perhaps one day we shall read the history of those councils of war between the German generals, when men who had been confident of victory began to be haunted by doubt, hiding their fears even from themselves until they were forced to a gloomy recognition of grave perils. Some of these men must have wept and others cursed, while Von Kluck decided to play again for safety, and issued an order for retreat. Retreat! What would the Emperor say in Berlin where he waited for the prize of Paris and heard that it had slipped from his grasp? How could they explain the meaning of that retreat to the people at home, expecting loot from the Louvre and souvenirs from Paris shops?

Some of the officers thought these things—I have read their letters— but General von Kluck must have had only one dominating and absorbing thought, more important even than an Emperor's anger. "Gott im Himmel, shall I get this army back to a stronger line or shall I risk all on a fight in the open, against those French and British guns and almost equal odds?" The failure of the German centre was the gravest disaster, and threatened von Kluck with the menace of an enveloping movement by the Allied troops which might lead to his destruction, with the flower of the Imperial troops. Away back there on the Aisne were impregnable positions tempting to hard-pressed men. Leaving nothing to chance, the Germans had prepared them already in case of retreat, though it had not been dreamed of then as more than a fantastic possibility. The fortune of war itself as well as cautious judgment pointed back to the Aisne for safety. The allied armies were closing up, increasing in strength of men and guns as the hours passed. In a day or two it might be too late to reach the strongholds of the hills.

5

So the retreat of the German right wing which had cut like a knife through northern France until its edge was blunted by a wall of steel, began on September 5 and increased in momentum as the allied troops followed hard upon the enemy's heels. The great mass of the German left swung backwards in a steady and orderly way, not losing many men and not demoralized by this amazing turn in Fortune's wheel. "It is frightfully disappointing," wrote a German officer whose letter was found afterwards on his dead body. "We believed that we should enter Paris in triumph and to turn away from it is a bitter thing for the men. But I trust our chiefs and I know that it is only a strategical retirement. Paris will still be ours."

Truly it was a strategical retirement and not a "rout," as it was called by the English Press Bureau. But all retirements are costly when the enemy follows close, and the rearguard of Von Kluck's army was in a terrible plight and suffered heavy losses. The French light artillery opened fire in a running pursuit, advancing their guns from position to position with very brief halts, during which the famous soixante-quinze flung out shells upon bodies of troops at close range—so that they fell like wheat cut to pieces in a hailstorm. The British gunners were pushing forward, less impetuously but with a steady persistence, to the west of the River Ourcq, and after all their hardships; losses, and fatigues, the men who had been tired of retreating were heartened now that their turn had come to give chase.

Episodes that seem as incredible as a boy's romance of war took place in those first days of September when the German right rolled back in a retreating tide. On one of those days an English regiment marched along a dusty road for miles with another body of men tramping at the same pace on a parallel road, in the same white dust which cloaked their uniforms—not of English khaki, but made in Germany. Hundreds of German soldiers, exhausted by this forced march in the heat, without food or water, fell out, took to the cover of woods, and remained there for weeks, in parties of six or eight, making their way to lonely farmhouses where they demanded food with rifles levelled at frightened peasants, taking pot-shots at English soldiers who had fallen out in the same way, and hiding in thickets until they were hunted out by battues of soldiers long after the first great battle of the Marne. It was the time for strange adventures when even civilians wandering in the wake of battle found themselves covered by the weapons of men who cared nothing for human life, whether it was their own or another's, and when small battalions of French or English, led by daring officers, fought separate battles in isolated villages, held by small bodies of the enemy, cut off from the main army but savagely determined to fight to the death.

Out of the experiences of those few days many curious chapters of history will be written by regimental officers and men. I have heard scores of stories of that kind, told while the thrill of them still flushed the cheeks of the narrators, and when the wounds they had gained in these fields of France were still stabbed with red-hot needles of pain, so that a man's laughter would be checked by a quivering sigh and his lips parched by a great thirst.

6

Because of its vivid interest and its fine candour, I will give one such story. It was told to me by a young officer of Zouaves who had been in the thickest of the fighting to the east of Paris. He had come out of action with a piece of shell in his left arm, and his uniform was splashed with the blood of his wound. I wish I could write it in his soldierly French words;—so simple and direct, yet emotional at times with the eloquence of a man who speaks of the horrors which have scorched his eyes and of the fear that for a little while robbed him of all courage and of the great tragedy of this beastly business of war which puts truth upon the lips of men.

I wish also I could convey to my readers' minds the portrait of that young man with his candid brown eyes, his little black moustache, his black stubble of beard, as I saw him in the rags and tatters of his Zouave dress, concealed a little beneath his long grey-blue cape of a German Uhlan, whom he had killed with his sword.

When he described his experience he puffed at a long German pipe which he had found in the pocket of the cape, and laughed now and then at this trophy, of which he was immensely proud.

"For four days previous to Monday, September 7," he said, "we were engaged in clearing out the German 'boches' from all the villages on the left bank of the Ourcq, which they had occupied in order to protect the flank of their right wing."

"Unfortunately for us the English heavy artillery, which would have smashed the beggars to bits, had not yet come up to help us, although we expected them with some anxiety, as the big business events began as soon as we drove the outposts back to their main lines."

"However, we were quite equal to the preliminary task, and heartened by the news of the ammunition convoy which had been turned into a very pretty firework display by 'Soixante-dix Pau.' My Zouaves—as you see I belong to the First Division, which has a reputation to keep up—n'est-ce pas?—were in splendid form."

"They were just like athletes who want to be first off the mark, or rather perhaps I should say like bloodhounds on the scent."

"Still, just to encourage them a little, don't you know, I pulled out my revolver, showed it to my little ones, and said very gently that the first man who hesitated to advance under the fire of the German guns would be a dead man before he took a step to the rear. (In every regiment there are one or two men who want encouraging in this way.) Of course, they all laughed at me. They wanted to get near those German guns, and nearer still to the gunners. That was before they knew the exact meaning of shell-fire. Well, they did good things, those Zouaves of mine. But it wasn't pleasant work. We fought from village to village, very close fighting, so that sometimes we could look into our enemy's eyes. The Moroccans were with us, the native troops, unlike my boys who are Frenchmen, and they were like demons with their bayonet work."

"Several of the villages were set on fire by the Germans before they retired from them, and soon great columns of smoke with pillars of flame and clouds of flying sparks rose up into the blue sky, and made a picture of hell there. For really it was hell on earth.

"Our gunners were shelling the Germans from pillar to post, as it were, and strewing the ground with their dead. It was across and among these dead bodies that we infantry had to charge. They lay about in heaps, masses of bleeding flesh. It made me sick, even in the excitement of it all."

"The enemy's quickfirers were marvellous. I am bound to say we did not get it all our own way. They always manoeuvre them in the same style, and very clever it is. First of all they mask them with infantry. Then when the French charge they reveal them and put us to the test under the most withering fire. It is almost impossible to stand against it, and in this case we had to retire after each rush for about 250 metres."

"Then quick as lightning the Germans got their mitrailleuses across the ground which we had yielded to them, and waited for us to come on again; when they repeated the same operation."

"I can tell you it was pretty trying to the nerves, but my Zouaves were very steady in spite of fairly heavy losses."

"In a village named Penchard there was some very sharp fighting, and some of our artillery were posted hereabouts. Presently a German aeroplane came overhead circling round in reconnaissance. But it was out for more than that. Suddenly it began to drop bombs, and whether by design or otherwise—they have no manners, these fellows—they exploded in the middle of a field hospital. One of my friends, a young doctor, was wounded in the left arm by a bullet from one of these bombs, though I don't know what other casualties there were. But the inevitable happened. Shortly after the disappearance of the aeroplane the German shells searched the position, and found it with unpleasant accuracy. It is always the same. The German aeroplanes are really wonderful in the way they search out the positions of our guns. We always know that within half an hour of a-n observation by aeroplane the shells will begin to fall above the gunners unless they have altered their position. It was so in this fighting round Meaux yesterday.

"For some days this rat-hunting among the villages on the left bank of the Ourcq went on all the time, and we were not very happy. The truth was that we had no water for ourselves, and were four days thirsty. It was really terrible, for the heat was terrific during the day, and some of us were almost mad with thirst. Our tongues were blistered and swollen, our eyes had a silly kind of look in them, and at night we had horrid dreams. It was, I assure you, an intolerable agony."

"But we did our best for the horses. I have said we were four days without drink. That was because we used our last water for the poor beasts. A gentleman has to do that—you will agree?—and the French soldier is not a barbarian. Even then the horses had to go without a drop of water for two days, and I'm not ashamed to say that I wept salt tears to see the sufferings of those poor innocent creatures, who did not understand the meaning of all this bloody business and who wondered at our cruelty."

"The nights were dreadful. All around us were burning villages, the dear hamlets of France, and at every faint puff of wind the sparks floated about them like falling stars. But other fires were burning. Under the cover of the darkness the Germans had collected their dead and had piled them into great heaps and had covered them with straw and paraffin. Then they had set a torch to these funeral pyres."

"Carrion crows were about in the dawn that followed. Not many of them, but they came flopping about the dead bodies, and the living, with hungry beaks. One of my own comrades lay very badly wounded, and when he wakened out of his unconsciousness one of these beastly birds was sitting on his chest waiting for him to die. That is war!"

"Yet there are other things in war. Fine and splendid things. It was magnificent to see your English gunners come up. They were rather late in the field. They did not appear until midday on September 7, when the big battle was going on, and when we were doing our best to push back the German right wing. They came up just as if they were on the parade ground, marvellously cool, very chic fellows, superb in their manner of handling their guns. It was heavy artillery, and we badly wanted it. And nothing could budge your men, though the German shell-fire was very hot."

"That is the way with your British gunners. They are different from the French, who are always best when they are moving forward, but do not like to stay in one position. But when your men have taken up their ground, nothing can move them. Nothing on earth!"

"And yet the German shells were terrifying. I confess to you that there were times when my nerves were absolutely gone. I crouched down with my men—we were in open formation—and ducked my head at the sound of the bursting 'obus' and trembled in every limb as though I had a fit of ague. God rebuked me for the bombast with which I had spoken to my men."

"One hears the zip-zip of the bullets, the boom of the great guns, the tang of our sharp French artillery, and in all this infernal experience of noise and stench, the screams of dying horses and men joined with the fury of the gun-fire, and rose shrill above it. No man may boast of his courage. Dear God, there were moments when I was a coward with all of them!"

"But one gets used to it, as to all things. My ague did not last long. Soon I was cheering and shouting again. We cleared the enemy out of the village of Bregy, and that was where I fell wounded in the arm pretty badly, by a bit of shell. I bled like a stuck pig, as you can see, but when I came to myself again a brother officer told me that things were going on well, and that we had rolled back the German right. That was better than a bandage to me. I felt very well again, in spite of my weakness."

"It is the beginning of the end. The Germans are on the run. They are exhausted and demoralized. Their pride has been broken. They are short of ammunition. They know that their plans have failed. Now that we have them on the move nothing will save them. This war is going to finish quicker than people thought. I believe that in a few days the enemy will be broken, and that we shall have nothing more to do than kill them as they fight back in retreat."

That is the story without any re-touching of my own, of the young lieutenant of Zouaves whom I met after the battle of Meaux, with the blood still splashed upon his uniform.

It is a human story, giving the experience of only one individual in a great battle, but clearly enough there emerges from it the truth of that great operation which did irreparable damage to the German right wing in its plan of campaign. The optimism with which this officer ended his tale makes one smile a little now, though in a pitiful way. The words in which he prophesied a quick finish to the war were spoken in September 1914, before the agony of the winter campaign, the awful monotony of that siege warfare, and the tides of blood that came in the spring of another year.

7

The retreat of the Germans to the Marne, when those columns of men turned their backs on Paris and trudged back along many roads down which they had come with songs of victory and across stony fields strewn already with the debris of fighting, on through villages where they burned arid looted as they passed, left a trail of muck and blood and ruin. Five weeks before, when I had travelled through part of the countryside from the eastern frontier of France, the spirit of beauty dwelt in it. Those fields, without any black blotches on grass nibbled short by flocks of sheep, were fresh and green in the sunlight. Wild flowers spangled them with gold and silver. No horrors lurked in the woods, where birds sang shrill choruses to the humming undertone of nature's organists. Little French towns stood white on the hillsides and in villages of whitewashed houses under thatch roofs, with deep, low barns filled with the first fruits of the harvest, peasant girls laughed as they filled their jugs from the wells, and boys and girls played games in the marketplaces; and old men and women, sitting in the cool gloom of their doorways, watched the old familiar things of peaceful life and listened to the chimes of the church clocks, without any terror in their hearts. War had been declared, but it seemed remote in its actual cruelty. There was only the faint thrill of unaccustomed drama in the scenes which passed through these village streets as guns rattled over the cobble-stones, or as a squadron of light blue cavalry streamed by, with bronzed men who grinned at the peasant girls, and horses still groomed and glossy. It is true that in some of these villages mothers of France had clasped their sons to their bosoms and wept a little over their nestling heads and wept still more in loneliness when the boys had gone away. The shadow of the war had crept into all these villages of France, but outwardly they were still at peace and untroubled by the far-off peril. Nature was indifferent to the stupid ways of men. Her beauty had the ripeness of the full-blown summer and the somnolence of golden days when the woods are very still in the shimmering heat and not a grass-blade moves except when a cricket stirs it with its chirruping.

Now, along the line of the retreat, nature itself was fouled and the old dwelling-places of peace were wrecked. Fighting their way back the enemy had burned many villages, or had defended them against a withering fire from the pursuing troops, so that their blackened stumps of timber, and charred, broken walls, with heaps of ashes which were once farmhouses and barns, remained as witnesses of the horror that had passed. Along the roadways were the bodies of dead horses. Swarms of flies were black upon them, browsing on their putrefying flesh, from which a stench came poisoning the air and rising above the scent of flowers and the sweet smell of hay in eddying waves of abominable odour. In villages where there had been street fighting, like those of Barcy, and Poincy, Neufmoutiers and Montlyon, Douy-la-Ramee and Chevreville, the whitewashed cottages and old farmsteads which were used as cover by the German soldiers before they were driven out by shell-fire or bayonet charges, were shattered into shapeless ruin. Here and there a house had escaped. It stood trim and neat amid the wreckage. A cafe restaurant still displayed its placards advertising Dubonnet and other aperitifs, peppered by shrapnel bullets, but otherwise intact. Here and there whole streets stood spared, without a trace of conflict, and in a street away the cottages had fallen down like card-houses toppled over by the hand of a petulant child. In other villages it was difficult to believe that war had passed that way. It was rather as though a plague had driven their inhabitants to flight. The houses were still shuttered as when the bourgeoisie and peasant had fled at the first news of the German advance. It was only by the intense solitude and silence that one realized the presence of some dreadful visitation, only that and a faint odour of corruption stealing from a dark mass of unknown beastliness huddled under a stone wall, and the deep ruts and holes in the roadway, made by gun-carriages and wagons.

Spent cartridges lay about, and fragments of shell, and here and there shells which had failed to burst until they buried their nozzles in the earth.

French peasants prowled about for these trophies, though legally they had no right to them, as they came under the penalties attached to loot. In many of the cottages which were used by the German officers there were signs of a hasty evacuation. Capes and leather pouches still lay about on chairs and bedsteads. Half finished letters, written to women in the Fatherland who will never read those words, had been trampled under heel by hurrying boots.

I saw similar scenes in Turkey when the victorious Bulgarians marched after the retreating Turks. I never dreamed then that such scenes would happen in France in the wake of a German retreat. It is a little thing, like one of those unfinished letters from a soldier to his wife, which overwhelms one with pity for all the tragedy of war.

"Meine liebe Frau." Somewhere in Germany a woman was waiting for the scrap of paper, wet with dew and half obliterated by mud, which I picked up in the Forest of Compiegne She would wait week after week for that letter from the front, and day after day during those weeks she would be sick at heart because no word came, no word which would make her say, "Gott sei dank!" as she knelt by the bedside of a fair-haired boy so wonderfully like the man who had gone away to that unvermeidliche krieg which had come at last. I found hundreds of letters like this, but so soppy and trampled down that I could only read a word or two in German script. They fluttered about the fields and lay in a litter of beef-tins left behind by British soldiers on their own retreat over the same fields.

Yet I picked them up and stared at them and seemed to come closer into touch with the tragedy which, for the most part, up to now, I could only guess at by the flight of fugitives, by the backwash of wounded, by the destruction of old houses, and by the silence of abandoned villages. Not yet had I seen the real work of war, or watched the effects of shell-fire on living men. I was still groping towards the heart of the business and wandering in its backyards.

I came closer to the soul of war on a certain Sunday in September. By that time the enemy's retreat had finished and the German army under General von Kluck was at last on the other side of the Aisne, in the strongholds of the hills at which the French and British guns were vainly battering at the beginning of a long and dreary siege against entrenched positions.

All day long, on this Sunday in September, I trudged over battlefields still littered with the horrors of recent fighting, towards the lines, stretching northwards and eastwards from Vic-sur-Aisne to Noyon and Soissons, where for six days without an hour's pause one of the greatest battles in history had continued.

As I walked far beyond the rails from the town of Crepy-en-Valois, which had suffered the ravages of the German legions and on through the forest of Villers-Cotterets and over fields of turnips and stubble, which only a few days ago were trampled by French and British troops following the enemy upon their line of retreat, to the north side of the Aisne, the great guns of our heavy artillery shocked the air with thunderous reverberations.

Never for more than a minute or two did those thunderclaps cease. In those intervals the silence was intense, as though nature—the spirit of these woods and hills—listened with strained ears and a frightened hush for the next report. It came louder as I advanced nearer to the firing line, with startling crashes, as though the summits of the hills were falling into the deepest valleys. They were answered by vague, distant, murmurous echoes, which I knew to be the voice of the enemy's guns six miles further away, but not so far away that they could not find the range of our own artillery.

Presently, as I tramped on, splashing through water-pools and along rutty tracks ploughed up by the wheels of gun carriages, I heard the deeper, more sonorous booming of different guns, followed by a percussion of the air as though great winds were rushing into void spaces. These strange ominous sounds were caused by the heavy pieces which the enemy had brought up to the heights above the marshlands of the Aisne—the terrible 11-inch guns which outranged all pieces in the French or British lines. With that marvellous foresight which the Germans had shown in all their plans, these had been embedded in cement two weeks before in high emplacements, while their advanced columns were threatening down to Paris. The Germans even then were preparing a safe place of retreat for themselves in case their grand coup should fail, and our British troops had to suffer from this organization on the part of an enemy which was confident of victory but remembered the need of a safe way back.

I have been for many strange walks in my life with strange companions, up and down the world, but never have I gone for such a tramp with such a guide as on this Sunday within sound of the guns. My comrade of this day was a grave-digger.

His ordinary profession is that of a garde champetre, or village policeman, but during the past three weeks he had been busy with the spade, which he carried across his shoulder by my side. With other peasants enrolled for the same tragic task he had followed the line of battle for twenty kilometres from his own village, Rouville, near Levignen, helping to bury the French and British dead, and helping to burn the German corpses.

His work was not nearly done when I met him, for during the fighting in the region round the forest of Villers-Cotterets, twice a battlefield, as the Germans advanced and then retreated, first pursuing and then pursued by the French and British, 3000 German dead had been left upon the way, and 1000 of our Allied troops. Dig as hard as he could my friendly gravedigger had been unable to cover up all those brothers-in-arms who lay out in the wind and the rain.

I walked among the fields where they lay, and among their roughly piled graves, and not far from the heaps of the enemy's dead who were awaiting their funeral pyres.

My guide grasped my arm and pointed to a dip in the ground beyond the abandoned village of Levignen.

"See there," he said; "they take some time to burn."

He spoke in a matter-of-fact way, like a gardener pointing to a bonfire of autumn leaves.

But there in line with his forefinger rose a heavy rolling smoke, sluggish in the rain under a leaden sky, and I knew that those leaves yonder had fallen from the great tree of human life, and this bonfire was made from an unnatural harvesting.

The French and British dead were laid in the same graves—"Are they not brothers?" asked the man with the spade—and as soon as the peasants had courage to creep back to their villages and their woods they gathered leaves and strewed them upon those mounds of earth among which I wandered, as heroes' wreaths. But no such honour was paid to the enemy, and with a little petrol and straw they were put to the flames until only their charred ashes, windswept and wet with heavy rain, marked the place of their death.

It is the justice of men. It makes no difference. But as I stood and watched these smoky fires, between the beauty of great woods stretching away to the far hills, and close to a village which seemed a picture of human peace, with its old church-tower and red-brown roofs, I was filled with pity at all this misery and needless death which has flung its horror across the fair fields of France.

What was the sense of it? Why, in God's name, or the devil's, were men killing each other like this on the fields of France, so that human life was of no more value than that of vermin slaughtered ruthlessly? Each one of the German corpses whose flesh was roasting under those oily clouds of smoke had been a young man with bright hopes, and a gift of laughter, and some instincts of love in his heart. At least he had two eyes and a nose, and other features common to the brotherhood of man. Was there really the mark of the beast upon him so that he should be killed at sight, without pity? I wondered if in that roasting mass of human flesh were any of the men who had been kind to me in Germany—the young poet whose wife had plucked roses for me in her garden, and touched them with her lips and said, "Take them to England with my love"; or the big Bavarian professor who had shared his food with me in the hills above Adrianople; or any of the Leipzig students who had clinked glasses with me in the beer- halls.

It was Germany's guilt—this war. Well, I could not read all the secrets of our Foreign Office for twenty years or more to know with what tact or tactlessness, with what honesty or charity, or with what arrogance or indifference our statesmen had dealt with Germany's claims or Germany's aspirations. But at least I knew, as I watched those smouldering death-fires, that no individual corpse among them could be brought in guilty of the crime which had caused this war, and that not a soul hovering above that mass of meat could be made responsible at the judgment seat of God. They had obeyed orders, they had marched to the hymn of the Fatherland, they believed, as we did, in the righteousness of their cause. But like the dead bodies of the Frenchmen and the Englishmen who lay quite close, they had been done to death by the villainy of statecraft and statesmen, playing one race against another as we play with pawns in a game of chess. The old witchcraft was better than this new witchcraft, and not so fraudulent in its power of duping the ignorant masses.

My guide had no such sentiment. As he led me through a fringe of forest land he told me his own adventures, and heaped curses upon the enemy.

He had killed one of them with his own hand. As he was walking on the edge of a wood a Solitary Uhlan came riding over the fields, below the crest of a little hill. He was one of the outposts of the strong force in Crepy-en-Valois, and had lost his way to that town. He demanded guidance, and to point his remarks pricked his lance at the chest of the garde champetre.

But the peasant had been a soldier, and he held a revolver in the side pocket of his jacket. He answered civilly, but shot through his pocket and killed the man at the end of the lance. The Uhlan fell from his horse, and the peasant seized his lance and carbine as souvenirs of a happy moment.

But the moment was brief. A second later and the peasant was sick with fear for what he had done. If it should be discovered that he, a civilian, had killed a German soldier, every living thing in his village would be put to the sword—and among those living things were his wife and little ones.

He dragged his trophies into the forest, and lay in hiding there for two days until the enemy had passed.

Afterwards I saw the lance—it reached from the floor to the ceiling of his cottage—and for years to come in the village of Rouville it will be the centre-piece of a thrilling tale.

Other peasants joined my friendly gravedigger, and one of them—the giant of his village—told me of his own escape from death. He was acting as the guide of four British officers through a part of the forest. Presently they stopped to study their maps; and it was only the guide who saw at the other end of the glade a patrol of German cavalry. Before he could call out a warning they had unslung their carbines and fired. The British officers fell dead without a cry, and the peasant fell like a dead man also, rolling into a ditch, unwounded but paralysed with fear. They did not bother about him—that little German patrol. They rode off laughing, as though amused with this jest of death.

There have been many jests like that—though I see no mirth in them— and I could fill this chapter with the stories I have heard of this kind of death coming quite quickly in woods and fields where peasants raised their heads for a moment to find that the enemy was near. It is these isolated episodes among the homesteads of France, and in quiet villages girdled by silent woods, which seemed to reveal the spirit of war more even than the ceaseless fighting on the battle front with its long lists of casualties.

On that Sunday I saw the trail of this great spirit of evil down many roads.

I walked not only among the dead, but, what affected me with a more curious emotion, through villages where a few living people wrung their hands amidst the ruins of their homes.

Even in Crepy-en-Valois, which had suffered less than other towns through which the enemy had passed, I saw a wilful, wanton, stupid destruction of men—no worse I think than other men, but with their passions let loose and unrestrained. They had entered all the abandoned houses, and had found some evil pleasure in smashing chairs and tables and lampshades and babies' perambulators, and the cheap but precious ornaments of little homes. They had made a pigsty of many a neat little cottage, and it seemed as though an earthquake had heaped everything together into a shapeless, senseless litter. They entered a musical instrument shop, and diverted themselves, naturally enough, with gramophones and mouth-organs and trumpets and violins. But, unnaturally, with just a devilish mirth, they had then smashed all these things into twisted metal and broken strings. In one cottage an old man and woman, among the few inhabitants who remained, told me their story.

They are Alsatians, and speak German, and with the craftiness which accompanies the simplicity of the French peasant, made the most of this lucky chance. Nine German soldiers were quartered upon them, and each man demanded and obtained nine eggs for the meal, which he washed down with the peasant's wine. Afterwards, they stole everything they could find, and with their comrades swept the shops clean of shirts, boots, groceries, and everything they could lay their hands on. They even took the hearses out of an undertaker's yard and filled them with loot. Before they left Crepy-en-Valois, they fired deliberately, I was told, upon Red Cross ambulances containing French wounded.

Yet it was curious that the old Alsatian husband who told me some of these things had amusement rather than hatred in his voice when he described the German visit before their quick retreat from the advancing British. He cackled with laughter at the remembrance of a moment of craftiness when he crept out of his back door and wrote a German sentence on his front door in white chalk. It was to the effect that the inhabitants of his house were honest folk—gute leute—who were to be left in peace... He laughed in a high old man's treble at this wily trick. He laughed again, until the tears came into his eyes, when he took me to a field where the French and British had blown up 3000 German shells abandoned by the enemy at the time of their retreat. The field was strewn with great jagged pieces of metal, and to the old Alsatian it seemed a huge joke that the Germans had had to leave behind so much "food for the guns." After all it was not a bad joke as far as we are concerned.

On that Sunday in September I saw many things which helped me to understand the meaning of war, and yet afterwards became vague memories of blurred impressions, half obliterated by later pictures. I remember that I saw the movements of regiments moving up to support the lines of the Allies, and the carrying up of heavy guns for the great battle which had now reached its sixth day, and the passing, passing, of Red Cross trains bringing back the wounded from that terrible front between Vic and Noyon, where the trenches were being filled and refilled with dead and wounded, and regiments of tired men struggled forward with heroic endurance to take their place under the fire of those shells which had already put their souls to the test of courage beyond anything that might be demanded, in reason, from the strongest heart.

And through the mud and the water-pools, through the wet bracken and undergrowth, in a countryside swept by heavy rainstorms, I went tramping with the gravedigger, along the way of the German retreat, seeing almost in its nakedness the black ravage of war and its foul litter.

Here and there the highway was lined with snapped and twisted telegraph wires. At various places great water-tanks and reservoirs had been toppled over and smashed as though some diabolical power had made cockshies of them. I peered down upon the broken bridge of a railway line, and stumbled across uprooted rails torn from their sleepers and hurled about the track.

My gravedigger plucked my sleeve and showed me where he had buried a French cuirassier who had been shot as he kept a lonely guard at the edge of a wood.

He pointed with his spade again at newly-made graves of French and British. The graves were everywhere—mile after mile, on the slopes of the hills and in the fields and the valleys, though still on the battleground my friend had work to do.

I picked up bullets from shrapnels. They are scattered like peas for fifteen miles between Betz and Mortefontaine, and thicker still along the road to Vic. The jagged pieces of shell cut my boots. I carried one of the German helmets for which the peasants were searching among cabbages and turnips. And always in my ears was the deep rumble of the guns, those great booming thunder-blows, speaking from afar and with awful significance of the great battle, which seemed to be deciding the destiny of our civilization and the new life of nations which was to come perhaps out of all this death.



Chapter VI Invasion



1

Before this year has ended England will know something of what war means. In English country towns there will be many familiar faces missing, many widows and orphans, and many mourning hearts. Dimly and in a far-off way, the people who have stayed at home will understand the misery of war and its brutalities. But in spite of all our national effort to raise great armies, and our immense national sacrifice in sending the best of our young manhood to foreign battlefields, the imagination of the people as a whole will still fail to realize the full significance of war as it is understood in France and Belgium. They will not know the meaning of invasion.

It is a great luck to be born in an island. The girdle of sea is a safeguard which gives a sense of security to the whole psychology of a race, and for that reason there is a gulf of ignorance about the terrors of war which, happily, may never be bridged by the collective imagination of English and Scottish people. A continental nation, divided by a few hills, a river, or a line on the map, from another race with other instincts and ideals, is haunted throughout its history by a sense of peril. Even in times of profound peace, the thought is there, in the background, with a continual menace. It shapes the character of a people and enters into all their political and educational progress. To keep on friendly terms with a powerful next-door neighbour, or to build defensive works high enough to make hostility a safe game, is the lifework of its statesmen and its politicians. Great crises and agitations shake the nation convulsively when cowardice or treachery or laziness has allowed that boundary wall to crumble or has made a breach in it. The violence of the Dreyfus affair was not so much due to a Catholic detestation of the Jewish race, but in its root-instincts to a fear of the German people over the frontier making use of French corruption to sap the defensive works which had been raised against them.

The necessity of conscription is obvious beyond argument to a continental people still cherishing old traditions of nationality, and the military training which is compulsory for all young men of average health, not only shapes the bodies of their lads, but also shapes their minds, so that their outlook upon life is largely different from that of an island people protected by the sea. They know that they have been born of women for one primary object—to fight when the time comes in, defence of the Fatherland, to make one more human brick in the great wall of blood and spirit dividing their country and race from some other country and race. At least that is the lesson taught them from first to last in the schools and in the national assemblies, and there are only a few minds which are able to see another way of life when the walls of division may be removed and when the fear of a next-door neighbour may be replaced by friendship and common interests.

The difference between the intellectual instincts of an island people and that of a continental race was the cause of the slow way in which England groped her way to an understanding of the present war, so that words of scorn and sarcasm, a thousand mean tricks of recruiting sergeants in high office, and a thousand taunts had to be used to whip up the young men of Great Britain, and induce them to join the Army. Their hearths and homes were not in immediate danger. They could not see any reasonable prospect of danger upon English soil. Their women were safe. Their property, bought on the hire system out of hard-earned wages, was not, they thought, in the least likely to be smashed into small bits or carried off as loot. They could not conceive the idea of jerry-built walls which enshrined all the treasures of their life suddenly falling with a crash like a house of cards, and burying their babies. The British Expeditionary Force which they were asked to join was after all only a sporting party going out to foreign fields for a great adventure.

2

In France there were no such illusions. As soon as war was imminent the people thought of their frontiers, and prayed God in divers ways that the steel hedges there were strong enough to keep back the hostile armies until the general call to the colours had been answered. Every able-bodied man in France was ready, whatever the cowardice in his heart, to fling himself upon the frontier to keep out, with his own body, the inrushing tide of German troops. The memory of 1870 had taught them the meaning of Invasion.

I saw the meaning of it during the first months of the war, when I wandered about France. In the north, nearest to the enemy, and along the eastern frontier, it was a great fear which spread like a plague, though more swiftly and terribly, in advance of the enemy's troops. It made the bravest men grow pale when they thought of their women and children. It made the most callous man pitiful when he saw those women with their little ones and old people, whose place was by the hearthside, trudging along the highroads, faint with hunger and weariness, or pleading for places in cattle-trucks already overpacked with fugitives, or wandering about un-lighted towns at night for any kind of lodging, and then, finding none, sleeping on the doorsteps of shuttered houses and under the poor shelter of overhanging gables.

For months, in every part of France there were thousands of husbands who had lost their wives and children, thousands of families who had been divided hopelessly in the wild confusion of retreats from a brutal soldiery. They had disappeared into the maelstrom of fugitives—wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and old grandmother, most of them without money and all of them dependent for their lives upon the hazard of luck. Every day in the French newspapers there were long lists of inquiries.

"M. Henri Planchet would be deeply grateful to anyone who can inform him of the whereabouts of his wife, Suzanne, and of his two little girls, Berthe and Marthe, refugees from Armentieres."

"Mme. Tardieu would be profoundly grateful for information about her daughter, Mme. des Rochers, who fled from the destroyed town of Albert on October 10, with her four children."

Every day I read some of these lists, finding a tragedy in every line, and wondering whether any of these missing people were among those whom I had met in the guard vans of troop trains, huddled among their bundles, or on wayside platforms, or in the long columns of retreating inhabitants from a little town deep in a wooded valley below the hills where German guns were vomiting their shrapnel.

Imagine such a case in England. A man leaves his office in London and takes the train to Guildford, where his wife and children are waiting supper for him. At Weybridge the train comes to a dead-halt. The guard runs up to the engine-driver, and comes back to say that the tunnel has been blown up by the enemy. It is reported that Guildford and all the villages around have been invaded. Families flying from Guildford describe the bombardment of the town. A part of it is in flames. The Guildhall is destroyed. Many inhabitants have been killed. Most of the others have fled.

The man who was going home to supper wants to set out to find his wife and children. His friends hold him back in spite of his struggles. "You are mad!" they shout. "Mad!"... He has no supper at home that night. His supper and his home have been burnt to cinders. For weeks he advertises in the papers for the whereabouts of his wife and babes. Nobody can tell him. He does not know whether they are dead or alive.

There were thousands of such cases in France. I have seen this tragedy—a man weeping for his wife and children swallowed up into the unknown after the destruction of Fives, near Lille. A new-born babe was expected. On the first day of life it would receive a baptism of fire. Who could tell this distracted man whether the mother or child were alive?

3

There were many villages in France around Lille and Armentieres, Amiens and Arras, and over a wide stretch of country in Artois and Picardy, where, in spite of all weariness, women who lay down beside their sleeping babes could find no sleep for themselves. For who could say what the night would bring forth? Perhaps a patrol of Uhlans, who shot peasants like rabbits as they ran across the fields, and who demanded wine, and more wine, until in the madness of drink they began to burn and destroy for mere lust of ruin. So it was at Senlis, at Sermaize, and in many villages in the region through which I passed.

It was never possible to tell the enemy's next move. His cavalry came riding swiftly far from the main lines of the hostile troops, and owing to the reticence of official news, the inhabitants of a town or village found themselves engulfed in the tide of battle before they guessed their danger. They were trapped by the sudden tearing-up of railway lines and blowing-up of bridges, as I was nearly trapped one day when the Germans cut a line a few hundred yards away from my train.

Yet the terror was as great when no Germans were seen, and no shells heard. It was enough that they were coming. They had been reported—often falsely—across distant hills. So the exodus began and, with perambulators laden with bread and apples, in any kind of vehicle—even in a hearse—drawn by poor beasts too bad for army requisitions, ladies of quality left their chateaux and drove in the throng with peasant women from whitewashed cottages. Often in a little while both the chateau and the cottage were buried in the same heap of ruins.

In a week or two, the enemy was beaten back from some of these places, and then the most hardy of the townsfolk returned "home." I saw some of them going home-at Senlis, at Sermaize, and other places. They came back doubtful of what they would find, but soon they stood stupefied in front of some charred timbers which were once their house. They did not weep, but just stared in a dazed way. They picked over the ashes and found burnt bits of former treasures— the baby's cot, the old grandfather's chair, the parlour clock. Or they went into houses still standing neat and perfect, and found that some insanity of rage had smashed up all their household, as though baboons had been at play or fighting through the rooms. The chest of drawers had been looted or its contents tumbled out upon the floor. Broken glasses, bottles, jugs, were mixed up with a shattered violin, the medals of a grandfather who fought in '70, the children's broken toys, clothes, foodstuff, and picture frames. I saw many of such houses after the coming and going of the German soldiers.

Even for a correspondent in search of a vantage-ground from which he might see something of this war, with a reasonable chance of being able to tell the story afterwards, the situation in France during those early days was somewhat perilous.

It is all very well to advance towards the fighting lines when the enemy is opposed by allied forces in a known position, but it is a quite different thing to wander about a countryside with only the vaguest idea of the direction in which the enemy may appear, and with the disagreeable thought that he may turn up suddenly round the corner after cutting off one's line of retreat. That was my experience on more than one day of adventure when I went wandering with those two friends of mine, whom I have alluded to as the Strategist and the Philosopher. Not all the strategy of the one or the philosophy of the other could save us from unpleasant moments when we blundered close to the lines of an unexpected enemy.

That was our experience on an early day in October, when we decided to go to Bethune, which seemed an interesting place in the war-zone.

It may seem strange in England that railway trains should still be running in the ordinary way, according to the time-tables of peace, in these directions, and that civilians should have been allowed to take their tickets without any hint as to the danger at the journey's end. But in spite of the horror of invasion, French railway officials showed an extraordinary sang-froid and maintained their service, even when they knew that their lines might be cut, and their stations captured, within an hour or two. Ignorance also helped their courage and, not knowing the whereabouts of the enemy even as well as I did, they ran their trains to places already threatened by advancing squadrons.

On this October day, for example, there was no sign of surprise on the part of the buxom lady behind the guichet of the booking-office when I asked for a ticket to Bethune, although there had been heavy fighting in that district only a few hours before, at the end of a great battle extending over several days.

In the train itself were several commercial gentlemen, on their way to Lille, by way of the junction at Arques, where they had to change; and with two or three French soldiers, and a lady entirely calm and self- possessed, they discussed the possibility of getting into a city round which the German cavalry were reported to be sweeping in a great tide. Another man who entered into conversation with me was going to Bethune. He had a wife and family there and hoped they were safe. It was only by a sudden thoughtfulness in his eyes that I could guess that behind that hope was a secret fear, which he did not express even to himself. We might have been a little party of people travelling, say, between Surbiton and Weybridge on an autumn afternoon, when the golf-ball flies across the links. Not one of them showed the least sign of anxiety, the least consciousness of peril close at hand.

Looking out of the carriage window I saw that trenches had been dug in all the adjacent fields, and that new trenches were being made hastily but efficiently by gangs of soldiers, who had taken off their blue coats for once, and were toiling cheerily at their task. In all the villages we passed were battalions of infantry guarding the railway bridges and level crossings. Patrols of cavalry rode slowly down the roads. Here and there some of them were dismounted, with their horses tethered, and from behind the cover of farmhouses or haystacks, looked across the country, with their carbines slung across their shoulders, as though waiting for any Uhlans that might appear that way.

All around us was the noise of guns, firing in great salvoes across the hills, ten miles or more away. Suddenly, as we approached the junction at Arques, there was an explosion which sounded very close to us; and the train came to a dead stop on grinding brakes.

"What's that?" asked a man in the carriage, sharply.

I thrust my head out of the carriage window and saw that all along the train other faces were staring out. The guard was running down the platform. The station-master was shouting to the engine-driver. In a moment or two we began to back, and kept travelling backwards until we were out of the station... The line had just been blown up beyond Arques by a party of Uhlans, and we were able to thank our stars that we had stopped in time. We could get no nearer to Bethune, over which next day the tide of war had rolled. I wondered what had happened to the wife and children of the man who was in the carriage with me.

At Aire-sur-Lys there were groups of women and children who, like so many others in those days, had abandoned their houses and left all they had in the world save a few bundles of clothes and baskets of food. I asked them what they would do when the food was finished.

"There will always be a little charity, m'sieur," said one woman, "and at least my children are safe."

After the first terror of the invasion those women were calm and showed astounding courage and resignation.

It was more than pitiful to see the refugees on the roads from Hazebrouck. There was a constant stream of them in those two cross-currents, and they came driving slowly along in bakers' carts and butchers' carts, with covered hoods, in farm carts loaded up with several families or trudging along with perambulators and wheelbarrows. The women were weary. Many of them had babies in their arms. The elder children held on to their mother's skirts or tramped along together, hand in hand. But there was no trace of tears. I heard no wailing cry. Some of them seemed utterly indifferent to this retreat from home. They had gone beyond the need of tears.

From one of these women, a lady named Mme. Duterque, who had left Arras with a small boy and girl, I heard the story of her experiences in the bombarded town. There were hundreds of women who had similar stories, but this one is typical enough of all those individual experiences of women who quite suddenly, and almost without warning, found themselves victims of the Invasion.

She was in her dressing-room in one of the old houses of the Grande Place in Arras, when at half-past nine in the morning the first shell burst over the town very close to her own dwelling-place. For days there had been distant firing on the heights round Arras, but now this shell came with a different, closer, more terrible sound.

"It seemed to annihilate me for a moment," said Mme. Duterque. "It stunned all my senses with a frightful shock. A few moments later I recovered myself and thought anxiously of my little girl who had gone to school as usual a few streets away. I was overjoyed when she came trotting home, quite unafraid, although by this time the shells were falling in various parts of the town."

On the previous night Mme. Duterque had already made preparations in case the town should be bombarded. Her house, like most of the old houses in Arras, had a great cellar, with a vaulted roof, almost as strong as a castle dungeon. She had stocked it with a supply of sardines and bread and other provisions, and as soon as she had her little daughter safe indoors again she took her children and the nurse down to this subterranean hiding-place, where there was greater safety. The cave, as she called it, was dimly lighted with a paraffin lamp, and was very damp and chilly, but it was good to be there in this hiding-place, for at regular intervals she could hear the terrible buzzing noises of a shell, like some gigantic hornet, followed by its exploding boom; and then, more awful still, the crash of a neighbouring house falling into ruins.

"Strange to say," said Mme. Duterque, "after my first shock I had no sense of fear, and listened only with an intense interest to the noise of these shells, estimating their distance by their sound. I could tell quite easily when they were close overhead, and when they fell in another part of the town, and it seemed to me that I could almost tell which of my friends' houses had been hit. My children, too, were strangely fearless. They seemed to think it an exciting adventure to be here in the great cellar, making picnic meals by the light of a dim lamp. My little boy amused himself by playing canes (hop-scotch), and my daughter was very cheerful. Still, after a little while we suffered. I had forgotten to bring down water or wine, and we also craved for something more comforting than cold sardines. In spite of the noise of houses falling into ruins—and at any moment mine might fall above my head—I went upstairs and began to cook some macaroni. I had to retreat in a hurry, as a shell burst quite close to my house, and for a moment I thought that I should be buried under my own roof. But I went up again in one of the intervals of silence, found the macaroni cooked to a turn and even ventured to peep out of doors. There I saw a dreadful sight. The whole of the Grande Place was littered with broken roofs and shattered walls, and several of the houses were burning furiously. From other parts of the town there came up great volumes of smoke and the red glare of flames."

For three days Mme. Duterque kept to her cellar. Unknown to herself, her husband, who had come from Boulogne to rescue her, was watching the battle from one of the heights outside the town, which he was forbidden to enter by the soldiers. On a Thursday morning she resolved to leave the shelter of her underground vault. News had been brought to her by a daring neighbour that the Germans had worked round by the railway station and might enter the town.

"I had no fear of German shells," she said, "but I had a great fear of German officers and soldiers. Imagine my fate if I had been caught by them, with my little daughter. For the first time I was filled with a horrible fear, and I decided to fly from Arras at all costs."

With her children and the nurse, she made her way through the streets, above which the shells were still crashing, and glanced with horror at all the destruction about her. The Hotel de Ville was practically destroyed, though at that time the famous belfry still stood erect above the ruined town, chiming out the hours of this tragedy.

Mme. Duterque told me her story with great simplicity and without any self-consciousness of her fine courage. She was only one of those thousands of women in France who, with a spiritual courage beyond one's understanding, endured the horrors of this war. It was good to talk with them, and I was left wondering at such a spirit.

It was with many of these fugitives that I made my way back. Away in the neighbourhood of Hazebrouck the guns were still booming, and across the fields the outposts of French cavalry were waiting for the enemy.

4

It was better for women and children to be in Arras under continual shell-fire than in some of those villages along the valleys of the Marne and the Meuse and in the Department of the Seine, through which the Germans passed on their first march across the French frontier. It was a nicer thing to be killed by a clean piece of shell than to suffer the foulness of men whose passions had been unleashed by drink and the devil and the madness of the first experience of war, and by fear which made them cruel as beasts.

I think fear was at the heart of a good deal of those atrocious Bets by which the German troops stained the honour of their race in the first phases of the war. Advancing into a hostile country, among a people whom they knew to be reckless in courage and of a proud spirit, the generals and high officers were obsessed with the thought of peasant warfare, rifle-shots from windows, murders of soldiers billeted in farms, spies everywhere, and the peril of franc-tireurs, goading their troops on the march. Their text-books had told them that all this was to be expected from the French people and could only be stamped out by ruthlessness. The proclamations posted on the walls of invaded towns reveal fear as well as cruelty. The mayor and prominent citizens were to surrender themselves as hostages. If any German soldier were killed, terrible reprisals would be exacted. If there were any attempt on the part of the citizens to convey information to the French troops, or to disobey the regulations of the German commander, their houses would be burned and their property seized, and their lives would pay the forfeit. These bald- headed officers in pointed helmets, so scowling behind their spectacles, had fear in their hearts and concealed it by cruelty.

When such official proclamations were posted up on the walls of French villages, it is no wonder that the subordinate officers and their men were nervous of the dangers suggested in those documents, and found perhaps without any conscious dishonesty clear proof of civilian plots against them. A shot rang out down a village street. "The peasants are firing on us!" shouted a German soldier of neurotic temperament. "Shoot them at sight!" said an officer who had learnt his lesson of ruthlessness. "Burn these wasps out! Lieber Gott, we will teach them a pretty lesson!"

They had all the material for teaching the pretty lessons of war— inflammable tablets which would make a house blaze in less than five minutes after they had been strewn about the floors and touched by a lighted match (I have a few specimens of the stuff)—incendiary bombs which worked even more rapidly, torches for setting fire to old barns and thatched roofs. In the wonderful equipment of the German army in the field this material of destruction had not been forgotten and it was used in many little towns and villages where German soldiers heard real or imaginary shots, suspected betrayal from any toothless old peasant, and found themselves in the grip of fear because these Frenchwomen, these old men of the farm and the workshop, and even the children, stared at them as they passed with contemptuous eyes and kept an uncomfortable silence even when spoken to with cheerful Teuton greetings, and did not hide the loathing of their souls. All this silence of village people, all these black looks seemed to German soldiers like an evil spell about them. It got upon their nerves and made them angry. They had come to enjoy the fruits of victory in France, or at best the fruits of life before death came. So these women would not smile, eh? Nor give their kisses nor their love with amiability? Well, a German soldier would have his kisses even though he had to hold a shrieking woman to his lips. He would take his love even though he had to kill the creature who refused it. These Frenchwomen were not so austere as a rule in times of peace. If they would not be fondled they should be forced. Herr Gott! they should know their masters.

5

At the little town of Rebais in the department of Seine-et-Marne there was a pretty Frenchwoman who kept a grocer's shop and did not care for the way in which some German soldiers made free with her biscuits and sweetmeats. She was a proud and fearless young woman, and when the soldiers grinned at her and tried to put their arms about her she struck them and called them unpleasant names and drew an open knife. So she wanted her lesson? Well, she had a soft white neck, and if they could not put their arms about it they would put a rope round it and hang her with her pride. But she was strong and quick as well as proud. She cut their rope with her knife and fought like a wild thing. So they slashed at her with their fists and bruised all her beauty by the time one of their officers came in and ordered them away. No one would court her after the lesson they had given her.