30 P.M., Berlin time. It was the last train that reached the
frontier from Paris. Between Delle and Bicourt lies a neutral zone about
three kilometers--say, nearly two and a half miles--in extent. On one
side France and invasion and terror and war; on the other side of the
zone the relative safety of Switzerland. Six hundred passengers poured
out of the French train at noon into that neutral zone and started to
walk to Swiss safety. A blazing August sun; a road of pebbles and
stinging, upblown dust.

The passengers had been permitted to bring on the train only what
luggage they could carry; so they were laden with bags and coats,
dressing bags and jewel cases--all they had deemed most valuable. Mostly
women. German ladies fleeing for refuge; Russian ladies; English,
American; and a crowd of men, urgent to reach their armies, German,
Swiss, Russian, Austrian, Servian, Italian; withal many of the kind of
American men who go to Switzerland in August.

And the caravan started in the dust and heat of a desert. A woman let
fall her heavy bag and plodded on. Another threw away her coats. Men
shook off their bundles. The heat was stifling. And through the clouds
of dust a panic terror crept. It was the antique terror of the God
Pan--the God All; it was a fear as immense as the sky.

A woman screamed and began to run, throwing away everything she had
safeguarded so she might run with empty hands. A score followed her. Men
began to run. They thrust the women aside, cursing; and ran. And for
over two miles the road was covered thick with coats and bags, with
packages and jewel cases. The greed of possession died out in the
causeless fear.

These hoarse, pushing men, these sweating, shameless women had gone back
10,000 years into prehistoric savagery. Lightly they threw away all the
baubles and gewgaws civilization had fashioned for adorning and
disguising their raw humanity, and the habits of civilization as well.

They had touched but the outermost edge of war, and their very clothes
fell off them.

III.

BARBARISM AND WOMEN.

War; and it takes eighty-four hours to make a twelve-hour journey from
the Alps to Paris; the cable is dead; the telegraph is dumb; letters go
only when smuggled over the frontiers by couriers; you look about you
and find you are in a mediaeval and mysterious world. You stand amid the
melancholy ruins of canceled cycles. The mailed fist of war has smashed
your world to pieces. You do not know it