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Chapter III The Secret War

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

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

"Tout va bien!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Philosopher answered these unspoken questions.

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

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

"Mons. I expect our next line of defence will be Le Cateau and

Cambrai. If we're hard pressed we shall hear something about St.

Quentin, too. It's quite on the cards we shall have to fall back, but I

hope to Heaven in good order and with sound lines of communication."

"It's frightful!" I said. "We are seeing nothing of all this. Nothing!

If only we could get near it!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Dieu! … C'est trop! c'est trop!"

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

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

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

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

"C'est la guerre!"

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

"C'est la guerre!"

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

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