h quicker than people thought. I believe that in a few days the
enemy will be broken, and that we shall have nothing more to do than
kill them as they fight back in retreat."

That is the story without any re-touching of my own, of the young
lieutenant of Zouaves whom I met after the battle of Meaux, with the
blood still splashed upon his uniform.

It is a human story, giving the experience of only one individual in a
great battle, but clearly enough there emerges from it the truth of that
great operation which did irreparable damage to the German right
wing in its plan of campaign. The optimism with which this officer
ended his tale makes one smile a little now, though in a pitiful way.
The words in which he prophesied a quick finish to the war were
spoken in September 1914, before the agony of the winter campaign,
the awful monotony of that siege warfare, and the tides of blood that
came in the spring of another year.

7

The retreat of the Germans to the Marne, when those columns of
men turned their backs on Paris and trudged back along many roads
down which they had come with songs of victory and across stony
fields strewn already with the debris of fighting, on through villages
where they burned arid looted as they passed, left a trail of muck and
blood and ruin. Five weeks before, when I had travelled through part
of the countryside from the eastern frontier of France, the spirit of
beauty dwelt in it. Those fields, without any black blotches on grass
nibbled short by flocks of sheep, were fresh and green in the sunlight.
Wild flowers spangled them with gold and silver. No horrors lurked in
the woods, where birds sang shrill choruses to the humming
undertone of nature's organists. Little French towns stood white on
the hillsides and in villages of whitewashed houses under thatch
roofs, with deep, low barns filled with the first fruits of the harvest,
peasant girls laughed as they filled their jugs from the wells, and boys
and girls played games in the marketplaces; and old men and
women, sitting in the cool gloom of their doorways, watched the old
familiar things of peaceful life and listened to the chimes of the church
clocks, without any terror in their hearts. War had been declared, but
it seemed remote in its actual cruelty. There was only the faint thrill of
unaccustomed drama in the scenes which passed through these
village streets as guns rattled over the cobble-stones, or as a
squadron of light bl