to give a rose colour to black shadows advancing rapidly
over the spirit of France suggested horrible uncertainties to those
who were groping in search of plain truth. But not all the severity of
the censorship, with its strangle-grip upon the truth-tellers, could hide
certain frightful facts. All these refugees pouring down from the north
could not be silenced, though none of their tales appeared in print.
They came with the news that Lille was invested, that the German
tide was rolling upon Armentieres, Roubaix, Tourcoing and Cambrai,
that the French and English were in hard retreat. The enemy's
cavalry was spreading out in a great fan, with outposts of Uhlans
riding into villages where old French peasants had not dreamed of
being near the line of battle until, raising their heads from potato fields
or staring across the stacked corn, they had seen the pointed
casques and the flash of the sun on German carbines.

There were refugees who had seen the beginning of battles, taking
flight before the end of them. I met some from Le Cateau, who had
stared speechlessly at familiar hills over which came without warning
great forces of foreign soldiers. The English had come first, in clouds
of dust which powdered their uniforms and whitened their sun-baked
faces. They seemed in desperate hurry and scratched up mounds of
loose earth, like children building sand castles, and jumped down into
wayside ditches which they used as cover, and lay on their stomachs
in the beetroot fields. They were cheerful enough, and laughed as
they littered the countryside with beef tins, and smoked cigarettes
incessantly, as they lay scorched under the glare of the sun, with their
rifles handy. Their guns were swung round with their muzzles nosing
towards the rising ground from which these English soldiers had
come. It seemed as though they were playing games of make
believe, for the fun of the thing. The French peasants had stood
round grinning at these English boys who could not understand a
word of French, but chattered cheerfully all the time in their own
strange language. War seemed very far away. The birds were singing
in a shrill chorus. Golden flowerlets spangled the green slopes. The
sun lay warm upon the hillside, and painted black shadows beneath
the full foliage of the trees. It was the harvest peace which, these
peasants had known all the years of their lives. Then suddenly the
click of rifle bolts, a rapid change in the attitude of th