Some of their bodies were horribly torn. They breathed with a hard
snuffle. A foul smell came from them.

At Chartres they were swilling over the station hall with disinfecting
fluid after getting through with one day's wounded. The French doctor
in charge had received a telegram from the director of medical
services: "Make ready for forty thousand wounded." It was during the
first battle of the Marne.

"It is impossible!" said the French doctor. . . .

Four hundred thousand people were in flight from Antwerp, into which
big shells were falling, as English correspondents flattened
themselves against the walls and said, "God in heaven!" Two hundred
and fifty thousand people coming across the Scheldt in rowing-boats,
sailing-craft, rafts, invaded one village in Holland. They had no
food. Children were mad with fright. Young mothers had no milk in
their breasts. It was cold at night and there were only a few canal-
boats and fishermen's cottages, and in them were crowds of fugitives.
The odor of human filth exuded from them, as I smell it now, and
sicken in remembrance . . . .

Then Dixmude was in flames, and Pervyse, and many other towns from the
Belgian coast to Switzerland. In Dixmude young boys of France--
fusiliers marins--lay dead about the Grande Place. In the Town Hall,
falling to bits under shell-fire, a colonel stood dazed and waiting
for death amid the dead bodies of his men--one so young, so handsome,
lying there on his back, with a waxen face, staring steadily at the
sky through the broken roof. . . .