yards, five hundred at a
time. Some of their faces were masks of clotted blood. Some of their
bodies were horribly torn. They breathed with a hard snuffle. A foul
smell came from them.

At Chartres they were swilling over the station hall with disinfecting
fluid after getting through with one day's wounded. The French doctor
in charge had received a telegram from the director of medical services:
"Make ready for forty thousand wounded." It was during the first battle
of the Marne.

"It is impossible!" said the French doctor....

Four hundred thousand people were in flight from Antwerp, into which
big shells were falling, as English correspondents flattened themselves
against the walls and said, "God in heaven!" Two hundred and
fifty thousand people coming across the Scheldt in rowing-boats,
sailing-craft, rafts, invaded one village in Holland. They had no
food. Children were mad with fright. Young mothers had no milk in their
breasts. It was cold at night and there were only a few canal-boats and
fishermen's cottages, and in them were crowds of fugitives. The odor
of human filth exuded from them, as I smell it now, and sicken in
remembrance....

Then Dixmude was in flames, and Pervyse, and many other towns from the
Belgian coast to Switzerland. In Dixmude young boys of France--fusiliers
marins--lay dead about the Grande Place. In the Town Hall, falling to
bits under shell-fire, a colonel stood dazed and waiting for death amid
the dead bodies of his men--one so young, so handsome, lying there on
his back, with a waxen face, staring steadily at the sky through the
broken roof....

At Nieuport-les-Bains one dead soldier lay at the end of the esplanade,
and a little group of living were huddled under the wall of a red-brick
villa, watching other villas falling like card houses in a town that had
been built for love and pretty women and the lucky people of the world.
British monitors lying close into shore were answering the German
bombardment, firing over Nieuport to the dunes by Ostend. From one
monitor came a group of figures with white masks of cotton-wool tipped
with wet blood. British seamen, and all blind, with the dead body of an
officer tied up in a sack....

"O Jesu!... O maman!... O ma pauvre p'tite femme!... O Jesu! O Jesu!"

From thousands of French soldiers lying wounded or parched in the
burning sun before the battle of the Marne these cries went up to the
blue sky of France in August of '14. They wer