The younger ones did not wait for it. They took their chance of
"seeing something," without authority, and made wild, desperate
efforts to break through the barrier that had been put up against them
by French and British staffs in the zone of war. Many of them were
arrested, put into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places,
rearrested, and expelled from France. That was after fantastic
adventures in which they saw what war meant in civilized countries
where vast populations were made fugitives of fear, where millions of
women and children and old people became wanderers along the roads in
a tide of human misery, with the red flame of war behind them and
following them, and where the first battalions of youth, so gay in
their approach to war, so confident of victory, so careless of the
dangers (which they did not know), came back maimed and mangled and
blinded and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat, which presently
became a spate through Belgium and the north of France, swamping over
many cities and thousands of villages and many fields. Those young
writing-men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went back to
Fleet Street with a queer look in their eyes, unable to write the
things they had seen, unable to tell them to people who had not seen
and could not understand. Because there was no code of words which
would convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing
of all civilized laws, to men and women who still thought of war in
terms of heroic pageantry.

"Had a good time?" asked a colleague along the corridor, hardly
waiting for an answer.

"A good time!" . . . God! . . . Did people think it was amusing to be
an onlooker of world-tragedy? . . . One of them remembered a lady of