ent by
road. On the arrival of the party, they found the children herded
together in old barracks, dirty and unfurnished, with no sanitary
appliances whatsoever. The sick were crowded together with the well.
Of the 350 children, twenty-one were under one year of age, and the
rest between one and eight years. The reason for this sudden crisis
was that the Huns were bombing the villages behind the lines with
asphyxiating gas. The military authorities had therefore withdrawn
all children who were too young to adjust their masks themselves, at
the same time urging their mothers to carry on the patriotic duty of
gathering in the harvest. It was the machinery of mercy which had been
built up in six months about this nucleus of eight persons that I set
out to visit.

The roads were crowded with the crack troops of France--the Foreign
Legion, the Tailleurs, the Moroccans--all marching in one direction,
eastward to the trenches. There were rumours of something immense
about to happen--no one knew quite what. Were we going to put on a
new offensive or were we going to resist one? Many answers were given:
they were all guesswork. Meanwhile, our progress was slow; we were
continually halting to let brigades of artillery and regiments
of infantry pour into the main artery of traffic from lanes and
side-roads. When we had backed our car into hedges to give them
room to pass, we watched the sea of faces. They were stern and yet
laughing, elated and yet childish, eloquent of the love of living and
yet familiar with their old friend, Death. They knew that something
big was to be demanded of them; before the demand had been made,
they had determined to give to the ultimate of their strength. There
was a spiritual resolution about their faces which made all their
expressions one--the uplifted expression of the unconquered soul of
France. That expression blotted out their racial differences. It did
not matter that they were Arabs, Negroes, Normans, Parisians; they
owned to one nationality--the nationality of martyrdom--and they
marched with a single purpose, that freedom might be restored to the
world.

When we reached the city to which we journeyed, night had fallen.
There was something sinister about our entry; we were veiled in fog,
and crept through the gate and beneath the ramparts with extinguished
head lights. Scarcely any one was abroad. Those whom we passed, loomed
out of the mist in silence, passed stealthily and vanished.