John Scott and Philip Lannes walked together down a great boulevard of
Paris. The young American's heart was filled with grief and anger. The
Frenchman felt the same grief, but mingled with it was a fierce, burning
passion, so deep and bitter that it took a much stronger word than anger
to describe it.

Both had heard that morning the mutter of cannon on the horizon, and
they knew the German conquerors were advancing. They were always
advancing. Nothing had stopped them. The metal and masonry of the
defenses at Liège had crumbled before their huge guns like china
breaking under stone. The giant shells had scooped out the forts at
Maubeuge, Maubeuge the untakable, as if they had been mere eggshells,
and the mighty Teutonic host came on, almost without a check.

John had read of the German march on Paris, nearly a half-century
before, how everything had been made complete by the genius of Bismarck
and von Moltke, how the ready had sprung upon and crushed the unready,
but the present swoop of the imperial eagle seemed far more vast and
terrible than the earlier rush could have been.

A month and the legions were already before the City of Light. Men with
glasses could see from the top of the Eiffel Tower the gray ranks that
were to hem in devoted Paris once more, and the government had fled
already to Bordeaux. It seemed that everything was lost before the war
was fairly begun. The coming of the English army, far too small in
numbers, had availed nothing. It had been swept up with the others,
escaping from capture or destruction only by a hair, and was now driven
back with the French on the capital.

John had witnessed two battles, and in neither had the Germans stopped