I took the night train down from Paris. Early in the morning I woke
up to find myself in the gorges of the Alps, high peaks with romantic
Italian-looking settings soaring on every side. At noon we reached
Lake Geneva, lying slate-coloured and sombre beneath a wintry sky.
That afternoon I saw the train of repatriés arrive.

I was on the platform when the train pulled into the station. It might
have been a funeral cortége, only there was a horrible difference: the
corpses pretended to be alive. The American Ambulance men were there
in force. They climbed into the carriages and commenced to help the
infirm to alight. The exiles were all so stiff with travel that they
could scarcely move at first. The windows of the train were grey with
faces. Such faces! All of them old, even the little children's. The
Boche makes a present to France of only such human wreckage as is
unuseful for his purposes. He is an acute man of business. The convoy
consisted of two classes of persons--the very ancient and the very
juvenile. You can't set a man of eighty to dig trenches and you can't
make a prostitute out of a girl-child of ten. The only boys were of
the mal-nourished variety. Men, women and children--they all had the
appearance of being half-witted.

They were terribly pathetic. As I watched them I tried to picture to
myself what three and a half long years of captivity must have meant.
How often they must have dreamt of the exaltation of this day--and
now that it had arrived, they were not exalted. They had the look of
people so spiritually benumbed that they would never know despair or
exaltation again. They had a broken look; their shoulders were crushed
and their skirts bedraggled. Many of them carried babies--pretty
little beggars with flaxen hair. It wasn't difficult to guess their
parentage.