thirsty as dogs, crowded the station platforms. They, too, had been
retreating and retreating. A company of sappers had blown up forty
bridges of France. Under a gas-lamp in a foul-smelling urinal I copied
out the diary of their officer. Some spiritual faith upheld these men.
"Wait," they said. "In a few days we shall give them a hard knock.
They will never get Paris. Jamais de la vie!" . . .

In Beauvais there was hardly a living soul when three English
correspondents went there, after escape from Amiens, now in German
hands. A tall cuirassier stood by some bags of gunpowder, ready to
blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and
broken bottles . . . In Paris there was a great fear and solitude,
except where grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway stations for
escape and where French and British soldiers--stragglers all--drank
together, and sang above their broken glasses, and cursed the war and
the Germans.

And down all the roads from the front, on every day in every month of
that first six months of war--as afterward--came back the tide of
wounded; wounded everywhere, maimed men at every junction; hospitals
crowded with blind and dying and moaning men . . . .

"Had an interesting time?" asked a man I wanted to kill because of his
smug ignorance, his damnable indifference, his impregnable stupidity
of cheerfulness in this world of agony. I had changed the clothes
which were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I
had helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons.
As an onlooker of war I hated the people who had not seen, because
they could not understand. All these things I had seen in the first
nine months I put down in a book called The Soul of the War, so that