Great God! that such work should not have been
done weeks before and not left like this to a day when the enemy's
guns were rumbling through Creil and smashing back the allied
armies in retreat!

It was a pitiful thing to see the deserted houses of the Paris suburbs.
It was as though a plague had killed every human being save those
who had fled in frantic haste. Those little villas on the riverside, so
coquette in their prettiness, built as love nests and summer-houses,
were all shuttered and silent Roses were blowing in their gardens, full-
blown because no woman's hand had been to pick them, and spilling
their petals on the garden paths. The creeper was crimsoning on the
walls and the grass plots were like velvet carpeting, so soft and
deeply green. But there were signs of disorder, of some hurried
transmigration. Packing-cases littered the trim lawns and cardboard
boxes had been flung about. In one small bower I saw a child's
perambulator, where two wax dolls sat staring up at the abandoned
house. Their faces had become blotchy in the dew of night, and their
little maman with her pigtail had left them to their fate. In another
garden a woman's parasol and flower-trimmed hat lay on a rustic seat
with an open book beside them. I imagined a lady of France called
suddenly away from an old romance of false sentiment by the visit of
grim reality--the first sound of the enemy's guns, faint but terrible to
startled ears.

"Les Allemands sont tout pres!"

Some harsh voice had broken into the quietude of the garden on the
Seine, and the open book, with the sunshade and the hat, had been
forgotten in the flight.

Yet there was one human figure here on the banks of the Seine
reassuring in this solitude which was haunted by the shadow of fear.
It was a fisherman. A middle-aged man with a straw hat on the back
of his head and a big pair of spectacles on the end of his nose, he
held out his long rod with a steady hand and waited for a bite, in an
attitude of supreme indifference to Germans, guns, hatred, tears and
all the miserable stupidities of people who do not fish. He was at
peace with the world on this day of splendour, with a golden sun and
a blue sky, and black shadows flung across the water from the tree
trunks. He stood there, a simple fisherman, as a protest against the
failure of civilization and the cowardice in the hearts of men. I lifted my
hat to him.

Close to Paris, too, in little market gardens and poor pl