ave hope that perhaps, after all, the tragedy which had
seemed so inevitable--the capture of the world's finest city--might not
be fulfilled.

This great movement was directed from the west, the south, and the
east, and continued without pause by day and night.

In stations about Paris I saw regiment after regiment entraining--men
from the southern provinces speaking the patois of the south, men
from the eastern departments whom I had seen a month before, at
the beginning of the war, at Chalons, and Epernay and Nancy, and
men from the southwest and centre of France in the garrisons along
the Loire.

They were all in splendid spirits, strangely undaunted by the rapidity
of the German advance. "Fear nothing, my little one," said a dirty
unshaven gentleman with the laughing eyes of d'Artagnan, "we shall
bite their heads off. These brutal 'Boches' are going to put
themselves in a veritable death-trap. We shall have them at last."

The railway carriages were garlanded with flowers of the fields. The
men wore posies in their kepis. In white chalk they had scrawled
legends upon the cattle-trucks in which they travelled. "A mort
Guillaume!" "Vive la Gloire!" "Les Francais ne se rendent jamais!"
Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the
Vosges. The youngest of them had bristling beards. Their blue coats
with the turned-back flaps were war-worn and flaked with the dust of
long marches. Their red trousers were sloppy and stained.

But they had not forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their
spirits was good to see. A friend of mine was not ashamed to say that
he had tears at least as high as his throat when he stood among
them and clasped some of those brown hands. There was a thrill not
to be recaptured in the emotion of those early days of war. Afterwards
the monotony of it all sat heavily upon one's soul.

They were very proud, those French soldiers, of fighting side by side
with their old foes the British, now after long centuries of strife, from
Edward the Black Prince to Wellington, their brothers-in-arms upon
the battlefields; and because I am English they offered me their
cigarettes and made me one of them.

In modern war it is only masses of men that matter, moved by a
common obedience at the dictation of mysterious far-off powers, and
I thanked Heaven that masses of men were on the move, rapidly, in
vast numbers, and in the right direction--to support the French lines
which had fallen