eir frontiers, and prayed God in divers ways
that the steel hedges there were strong enough to keep back the
hostile armies until the general call to the colours had been
answered. Every able-bodied man in France was ready, whatever the
cowardice in his heart, to fling himself upon the frontier to keep out,
with his own body, the inrushing tide of German troops. The memory
of 1870 had taught them the meaning of Invasion.

I saw the meaning of it during the first months of the war, when I
wandered about France. In the north, nearest to the enemy, and
along the eastern frontier, it was a great fear which spread like a
plague, though more swiftly and terribly, in advance of the enemy's
troops. It made the bravest men grow pale when they thought of their
women and children. It made the most callous man pitiful when he
saw those women with their little ones and old people, whose place
was by the hearthside, trudging along the highroads, faint with hunger
and weariness, or pleading for places in cattle-trucks already
overpacked with fugitives, or wandering about un-lighted towns at
night for any kind of lodging, and then, finding none, sleeping on the
doorsteps of shuttered houses and under the poor shelter of
overhanging gables.

For months, in every part of France there were thousands of
husbands who had lost their wives and children, thousands of
families who had been divided hopelessly in the wild confusion of
retreats from a brutal soldiery. They had disappeared into the
maelstrom of fugitives--wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and old
grandmother, most of them without money and all of them dependent
for their lives upon the hazard of luck. Every day in the French
newspapers there were long lists of inquiries.

"M. Henri Planchet would be deeply grateful to anyone who can
inform him of the whereabouts of his wife, Suzanne, and of his two
little girls, Berthe and Marthe, refugees from Armentieres."

"Mme. Tardieu would be profoundly grateful for information about her
daughter, Mme. des Rochers, who fled from the destroyed town of
Albert on October 10, with her four children."

Every day I read some of these lists, finding a tragedy in every line,
and wondering whether any of these missing people were among
those whom I had met in the guard vans of troop trains, huddled
among their bundles, or on wayside platforms, or in the long columns
of retreating inhabitants from a little town deep in a wooded valley
below th