tragedy and need of France as embodied in individuals. Evian-les-Bains
is on Lake Geneva, looking out across the water to Switzerland. It is
the first point of call across the French frontier for the repatriés
returning from their German bondage. When the Boche first swept down
on the northern provinces he pushed the French civilian population
behind him. He has since kept them working for him as serfs, labouring
in the captured coal-mines, digging his various lines of defences,
setting up wire-entanglements, etc. Apart from the testimony of
repatriated French civilians, I myself have seen messages addressed
by Frenchmen to their wives, scrawled surreptitiously on the planks of
Hun dug-outs in the hope that one day the dug-outs would be captured,
and the messages passed on by a soldier of the Allies. After three and
a half years of enforced labour, many of these captured civilians are
worked out. To the Boche, with his ever-increasing food-shortage, they
represent useless mouths. Instead of filling them he is driving their
owners back, broken and useless, by way of Switzerland. To him human
beings are merchandise to be sold upon the hoof like cattle. No
spiritual values enter into the bargain. When the body is exhausted it
is sent to the knacker's, as though it belonged to a worn-out horse.
The entire attitude is materialistic and degrading. Evian-les-Bains,
the once gay gambling resort of the cosmopolitan, has become the
knacker's shop for French civilians exhausted by their German
servitude. The Hun shoves them across the border at the rate of about
1,300 a day. From the start I have always felt that this war was a
crusade; what I saw at Evian made me additionally certain. When I was
in the trenches I never had any hatred of the Boche. Probably I shall
lose my hatred in pity for him when I get to the Front again--but
for the present I hate him. It's here in France that one sees what a
vileness he has created in the children's and women's lives.