e the cries of youth's
agony in war. Afterward I went across the fields where they fought and
saw their bodies and their graves, and the proof of the victory that
saved France and us. The German dead had been gathered into heaps like
autumn leaves. They were soaked in petrol and oily smoke was rising from
them....

That was after the retreat from Mons, and the French retreat along all
their line, and the thrust that drew very close to Paris, when I saw our
little Regular Army, the "Old Contemptibles," on their way back, with
the German hordes following close. Sir John French had his headquarters
for the night in Creil. English, Irish, Scottish soldiers, stragglers
from units still keeping some kind of order, were coming in, bronzed,
dusty, parched with thirst, with light wounds tied round with rags,
with blistered feet. French soldiers, bearded, dirty, thirsty as dogs,
crowded the station platforms. They, too, had been retreating and
retreating. A company of sappers had blown up forty bridges of France.
Under a gas-lamp in a foul-smelling urinal I copied out the diary of
their officer. Some spiritual faith upheld these men. "Wait," they said.
"In a few days we shall give them a hard knock. They will never get
Paris. Jamais de la vie!"...

In Beauvais there was hardly a living soul when three English
correspondents went there, after escape from Amiens, now in German
hands. A tall cuirassier stood by some bags of gunpowder, ready to
blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and broken
bottles... In Paris there was a great fear and solitude, except where
grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway stations for escape and where
French and British soldiers--stragglers all--drank together, and sang
above their broken glasses, and cursed the war and the Germans.

And down all the roads from the front, on every day in every month
of that first six months of war--as afterward--came back the tide of
wounded; wounded everywhere, maimed men at every junction; hospitals
crowded with blind and dying and moaning men....

"Had an interesting time?" asked a man I wanted to kill because of his
smug ignorance, his damnable indifference, his impregnable stupidity
of cheerfulness in this world of agony. I had changed the clothes
which were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I had
helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons. As an
onlooker of war I hated the people who had not see