e line swung down irresistible,
with the massy weight of its club aimed at Paris. If the eastern forts
at Toul and at Verdun and the resistance before Nancy had held back
its handle, that resistance had but enabled it to pivot with the freer
swing. Not only had there fallen back before its charge all the
arrayed armies of the French and their new Ally, but also all that had
counted in the hopes of the defenders had failed. All that the last
few years had promised in the new work of the air, all that a
generation had built up of permanent fortified work, had been proved
impotent before the new siege train. The barrier fortresses of the
Meuse, Liege and Namur, had gone up like paper in a fire. Maubeuge was
at its last days. Another week's bombardment and the ring of Verdun
would be broken.

The sweep has no parallel in the monstrous things of history. Ten days
had sufficed for the march upon the capital. Nor had there been in
that ten days a moment's hope or an hour of relaxation.

No such strain has yet been endured, so concentrated, so exact an
image of doom.

And all along the belt of that march the things that were the
sacrament of civilization had gone. Rheims was possessed, the village
churches of the "Island of France" and of Artois were ruins or
desolations. The peasantry already knew the destruction of something
more than such material things, the end of a certain social pact which
war in Christendom had spared. They had been massacred in droves, with
no purpose save that of terror; they had been netted in droves, the
little children and the women with the men, into captivity. The track
of the invasion was a wound struck not, as other invasions have been,
at some territory or some dynasty; it was a wound right home to the
heart of whatever is the West, of whatever has made our letters and
our buildings and our humour between them. There was a death and an
ending in it which promised no kind of reconstruction, and the fools
who had wasted words for now fifty years upon some imagined excellence
in the things exterior to the tradition of Europe, were dumb and
appalled at the sight of barbarism in action--in its last action after
the divisions of Europe had permitted its meaningless triumph for so
long. Were Paris entered, whether immediately or after that
approaching envelopment of the armies, it would be for destruction;
and all that is not replaceable in man's work would be lost to our
children at the hands of