e English soldier
boys, who stared northwards where the downs rose and fell in soft
billows, made the French peasants j gaze in that direction, shading
their eyes from the hot sun. What was that grey shadow moving?
What were those little glints and flashes in the greyness of it? What
were all those thousands of little ant-like things crawling forward over
the slopes? Thousands and scores of thousands of--men, and
horses and guns!

"Les Anglais? Toujours les Anglais?" An English officer laughed, in a
queer way, without any mirth in his eyes.

"Les Allemands, mon vieux. Messieurs les Boches!"

"L'enemi? Non--pas possible!"

It only seemed possible that it was the enemy when from that army of
ants on the hillsides there came forth little puffs of white smoke, and
little stabbing flames, and when, quite soon, some of those English
boys lay in a huddled way over their rifles, with their sunburned faces
on the warm earth. The harvest peace was broken by the roar of
guns and the rip of bullets. Into the blue of the sky rose clouds of
greenish smoke. Pieces of jagged steel, like flying scythes, sliced the
trees on the roadside. The beetroot fields spurted up earth, and great
holes were being dug by unseen ploughs. Then, across the distant
slopes behind the smoke clouds and the burst of flame came, and
came, a countless army, moving down towards those British soldiers.
So the peasants had fled with a great fear.

2

There was an extraordinary quietude in some of the port towns of
northern France. At first I could not understand the meaning of it
when I went from Calais to Boulogne, and then to Havre. In Calais I
saw small bodies of troops moving out of the town early in the
morning, so that afterwards there was not a soldier to be seen about
the streets. In Boulogne the same thing happened, quietly, and
without any bugle calls or demonstrations. Not only had all the
soldiers gone, but they were followed by the police, whom I saw
marching away in battalions, each man carrying a little bundle, like
the refugees who carried all their worldly goods with them, wrapped in
a blanket or a pocket-handkerchief, according to the haste of their
flight. Down on the quay there were no custom-house officers to
inspect the baggage of the few travellers who had come across the
Channel and now landed on the deserted siding, bewildered because
there were no porters to clamour for their trunks and no douane to
utter the familiar ritual