We were moving down the hill to the palaces beside the lake--the
palaces to which all France used to troop for pleasure. We moved
soddenly at first, shuffling in our steps. But the drums were still
rolling out their defiance and the bugles were still blowing. The
laziest man in the French Army was doing his utmost to belie his
record. The ill-shod, flattened feet took up the music. They began to
dance. Were there ever feet less suited to dancing? That they should
dance was the acme of tragedy. Stockings fell down in creases about
the ankles. Women commenced to jig their Boche babies in their arms;
consumptive men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and grotesque
bundles of umbrellas. The sight was damnable. It was a burlesque. It
pierced the heart. What right had the Boche to leave these people so
comic after he had squeezed the life-blood out of them?

All his insults to humanity became suddenly typified in these five
hundred jumping tatterdemalions--the way in which he had plundered the
world of its youth, its cleanness, its decency. I felt an anger which
battlefields had never aroused, where men moulder above ground and
become unsightly beneath the open sky. The slain of battlefields
were at least motionless; they did not gape and grin at you with
the dreadful humour of these perambulating dead. I felt the Galilean
passion which animates every Red Cross worker at Evian: the agony
to do something to make these murdered people live again. This last
convoy came, I discovered, from a city behind the Boche lines against
which last summer I had often directed fire. It was full in sight from
my observing station. I had watched the very houses in which these
people, who now walked beside me, had sheltered. For three and a half
years these women's bodies had been at the Hun's mercy. I tried to
bring the truth home to myself. Their men and young girls had been