x plus!" She was spent and could go no further, but halted
suddenly, dumped down her bundles and her babies and, leaning
against a sun-baked wall, thrust the back of a rough hand across her
forehead, with a moan of spiritual pain.

"Dieu! ... C'est trop! c'est trop!"

All day long these scenes went on, until I could bear them no longer,
but went indoors to the room which made me feel a selfish monster
because I shared it with only two friends. Boulogne became quiet in
the darkness. Perhaps by some miracle all those homeless ones had
found a shelter. ... I awakened out of a drowsy sleep to hear the
tramp of innumerable feet. A new army of fugitives had come into the
town, I heard voices murmuring below my window, arguing, pleading.
There was a banging at doors down the street.

"C'est impossible! Il n'y a pas de place! Il y a une foule qui dort en
plein air. Voyez! voyez!"

The night porter slammed his own door in a rage. Perhaps there was
pity in his heart as well as rage, but what can a man do when people
demand admittance to an hotel where there are already six people in
the bathroom and sixty on the floor of the salon, and stiff bodies
wrapped in blankets, like corpses in eternal sleep, lying about in the
corridors?

"There are crowds of people sleeping in the open air," he said, and
when I leaned out of the window, staring into the darkness of the
night and breathing in the cool air which had an autumn touch, I saw
dimly on the pavement below huddled figures in the doorways and
under the shelter of the eaves. A baby wailed with a thin cry. A
woman's voice whimpered just below my window, and a man spoke
to her.

"C'est la guerre!"

The words came up to me as though to answer the question in my
own mind as to why such things should be.

"C'est la guerre!"

Yes, it was war; with its brutality against women and children, its
horrible stupidity, its senseless overthrow of all life's decencies, and
comforts, and security. The non-combatants were not to be spared,
though they had not asked for war, and hated it.

Chapter IV
The Way Of Retreat

1

Ominous things were happening behind the screen. Good God! was
France to see another annee terrible, a second edition of 1870, with
the same old tale of unreadiness, corruption in high quarters,
breakdown of organization, and national humiliation after irreparable
disasters?

The very vagueness of the official communiques and their word-
jugglings