France with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in
flames and smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled
skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her husband was in the
battle that was now being fought round their own town. She was brave--
pointed out the line of the German advance on the map--and it was in a
troop-train crowded with French soldiers--and then burst into wild
weeping, clasping the hand of an English writing-man so that her nails
dug into his flesh. I remember her still.

"Courage, maman! Courage, p'tite maman!" said the boy of eight.

Through Amiens at night had come a French army in retreat. There were
dead and wounded on their wagons. Cuirassiers stumbled as they led
their tired horses. Crowds of people with white faces, like ghosts in
the darkness, stared at their men retreating like this through their
city, and knew that the enemy was close behind.

"Nous sommes perdus!" whispered a woman, and gave a wailing cry.

People were fighting their way into railway trucks at every station
for hundreds of miles across northern France. Women were beseeching a
place for the sake of their babes. There was no food for them on
journeys of nineteen hours or more; they fainted with heat and hunger.
An old woman died, and her corpse blocked up the lavatory. At night
they slept on the pavements in cities invaded by fugitives.

At Furnes in Belgium, and at Dunkirk on the coast of France, there
were columns of ambulances bringing in an endless tide of wounded.
They were laid out stretcher by stretcher in station-yards, five
hundred at a time. Some of their faces were masks of clotted blood.