mans cut a line a few hundred yards away from my
train.

Yet the terror was as great when no Germans were seen, and no
shells heard. It was enough that they were coming. They had been
reported--often falsely--across distant hills. So the exodus began and,
with perambulators laden with bread and apples, in any kind of
vehicle--even in a hearse--drawn by poor beasts too bad for army
requisitions, ladies of quality left their chateaux and drove in the
throng with peasant women from whitewashed cottages. Often in a
little while both the chateau and the cottage were buried in the same
heap of ruins.

In a week or two, the enemy was beaten back from some of these
places, and then the most hardy of the townsfolk returned "home." I
saw some of them going home-at Senlis, at Sermaize, and other
places. They came back doubtful of what they would find, but soon
they stood stupefied in front of some charred timbers which were
once their house. They did not weep, but just stared in a dazed way.
They picked over the ashes and found burnt bits of former treasures--
the baby's cot, the old grandfather's chair, the parlour clock. Or they
went into houses still standing neat and perfect, and found that some
insanity of rage had smashed up all their household, as though
baboons had been at play or fighting through the rooms. The chest of
drawers had been looted or its contents tumbled out upon the floor.
Broken glasses, bottles, jugs, were mixed up with a shattered violin,
the medals of a grandfather who fought in '70, the children's broken
toys, clothes, foodstuff, and picture frames. I saw many of such
houses after the coming and going of the German soldiers.

Even for a correspondent in search of a vantage-ground from which
he might see something of this war, with a reasonable chance of
being able to tell the story afterwards, the situation in France during
those early days was somewhat perilous.

It is all very well to advance towards the fighting lines when the
enemy is opposed by allied forces in a known position, but it is a quite
different thing to wander about a countryside with only the vaguest
idea of the direction in which the enemy may appear, and with the
disagreeable thought that he may turn up suddenly round the corner
after cutting off one's line of retreat. That was my experience on more
than one day of adventure when I went wandering with those two
friends of mine, whom I have alluded to as the Strategist and the
P