At Nieuport-les-Bains one dead soldier lay at the end of the
esplanade, and a little group of living were huddled under the wall of
a red-brick villa, watching other villas falling like card houses in a
town that had been built for love and pretty women and the lucky
people of the world. British monitors lying close into shore were
answering the German bombardment, firing over Nieuport to the dunes by
Ostend. From one monitor came a group of figures with white masks of
cotton-wool tipped with wet blood. British seamen, and all blind, with
the dead body of an officer tied up in a sack . . . .

"O Jesu! . . . O maman! . . . O ma pauvre p'tite femme! . . . O Jesu!
O Jesu!"

From thousands of French soldiers lying wounded or parched in the
burning sun before the battle of the Marne these cries went up to the
blue sky of France in August of '14. They were the cries of youth's
agony in war. Afterward I went across the fields where they fought and
saw their bodies and their graves, and the proof of the victory that
saved France and us. The German dead had been gathered into heaps like
autumn leaves. They were soaked in petrol and oily smoke was rising
from them . . . .

That was after the retreat from Mons, and the French retreat along all
their line, and the thrust that drew very close to Paris, when I saw
our little Regular Army, the "Old Contemptibles," on their way back,
with the German hordes following close. Sir John French had his
headquarters for the night in Creil. English, Irish, Scottish
soldiers, stragglers from units still keeping some kind of order, were
coming in, bronzed, dusty, parched with thirst, with light wounds tied
round with rags, with blistered feet. French soldiers, bearded, dirty,