ack
maimed and mangled and blinded and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat,
which presently became a spate through Belgium and the north of France,
swamping over many cities and thousands of villages and many fields.
Those young writing-men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went
back to Fleet Street with a queer look in their eyes, unable to write
the things they had seen, unable to tell them to people who had not seen
and could not understand. Because there was no code of words which would
convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing of all
civilized laws, to men and women who still thought of war in terms of
heroic pageantry.

"Had a good time?" asked a colleague along the corridor, hardly waiting
for an answer.

"A good time!"... God!... Did people think it was amusing to be an
onlooker of world-tragedy?... One of them remembered a lady of France
with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in flames and
smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled skirts on her
flight, and she had heard that her husband was in the battle that was
now being fought round their own town. She was brave--pointed out the
line of the German advance on the map--and it was in a troop-train
crowded with French soldiers--and then burst into wild weeping, clasping
the hand of an English writing-man so that her nails dug into his flesh.
I remember her still.

"Courage, maman! Courage, p'tite maman!" said the boy of eight.

Through Amiens at night had come a French army in retreat. There were
dead and wounded on their wagons. Cuirassiers stumbled as they led their
tired horses. Crowds of people with white faces, like ghosts in the
darkness, stared at their men retreating like this through their city,
and knew that the enemy was close behind.

"Nous sommes perdus!" whispered a woman, and gave a wailing cry.

People were fighting their way into railway trucks at every station for
hundreds of miles across northern France. Women were beseeching a place
for the sake of their babes. There was no food for them on journeys of
nineteen hours or more; they fainted with heat and hunger. An old woman
died, and her corpse blocked up the lavatory. At night they slept on the
pavements in cities invaded by fugitives.

At Furnes in Belgium, and at Dunkirk on the coast of France, there were
columns of ambulances bringing in an endless tide of wounded. They were
laid out stretcher by stretcher in station-