Chapter II: Part 2

My empty appointment as the representative of the American press with the British army was, at least, taken seriously by the policeman at the War Office in London when I returned from trips to France. The day came when it was good for British trenches and gun positions; when it was worth all the waiting, if one wished to see the drama of modern war intimately.

III

MONS AND PARIS

The English base--Stories of the wounded--The cataclysm a reality--
London after Mons--The call to Englishmen--The “Fog of war”--
From Dieppe to Paris--The red trousers of the French--Empty
Paris--Can the German machine be held?--“The French have not
had their battle yet!”

Back from Belgium to England; then across the Channel again to Boulogne, where I saw the last of the French garrison march away, their red trousers a throbbing target along the road. From Boulogne the British had advanced into Belgium. Now their base was moved on to Havre. Boulogne, which two weeks before had been cheering the advent of “Tommee Atkeens” singing “Why should we be downhearted?” was ominously lifeless. It was a town without soldiers, a town of brick and mortar and pavements whose very defencelessness was its security should the Germans come.

The only British there were a few stray wounded officers and men who had found their way back from Mons. They had no idea where the British army was. All they realised were sleepless nights, the shock of combat, overpowering artillery fire, and resisting the onslaught of outnumbering masses.

An officer of Lancers, who had ridden through the German cavalry with his squadron, dwelt on the glory of that moment. What did his wound matter? It had come with the burst of a shell in a village street which killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away, reached a railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.

A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when showers of shrapnel descended and the Germans, in that grey-green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battalion made another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him to find any transportation he could; and he, too, was able to get aboard a train. That was all he knew.

These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom of action. They were interesting because they were the first British wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.

Back to London again to catch the mail with an article. One was to “commute” to the war from London as home. It was a base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. One soaked in England at intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever one stepped on the pier at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea complete.

Those days of late August and early September, 1914, were gripping days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea was as yet only a splash of fresh blood. One still wondered if one might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare. Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of detail.

They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining-room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet glances as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home which had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go to the front.

Unconsciously she would play with her wedding-ring. She stole covert glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the throat, when he was not looking at her--which he was most of the time, for reasons which were good and sufficient to others than himself. Apprehended in “wool-gathering,” she mustered a smile which was so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so precious.

They would attempt little flights of talk about everything except the war. He was most solicitous that she should have something which she liked to eat, while she was equally solicitous about him. Wasn’t he going “out there”? And out there he would have to live on army fare. It was all appealing to the old traveller. And then the next morning-- she was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting. The incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for young wives to see young husbands away to the front with a smile.

One such incident does for all, whether the war is young or old. There is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband. I was rather glad that I did not know this pair. Then I should be looking at the casualty list in the newspaper each morning and I might not enjoy my faith that he will return alive. These two seemed to me the best of England. I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest turn of intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament poured out its oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words. The man went off to fight; the woman returned to her country home. It was the hour of war, not of talk.

On that Sunday in London when the truth about Mons appeared stark to all England, another young man happened to buy a special edition at a street corner at the same time as myself. By all criteria, the world and his tailor had treated him well and he deserved well of the world. We spoke together about the news. Already the new democracy which the war had developed was in evidence. Everybody had common thoughts and a common thing at stake, with values reckoned in lives, and this makes for equality.

“It’s clear that we have had a bad knock. Why deny it?” he said. Then he added quietly, after a pause: “This is a personal call for me. I’m going to enlist.”

England’s answer to that “bad knock” was out of her experience. She had never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had won the last battle. The next day’s news was worse and the next day’s still worse. The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by forced marches. Paris might fall--no matter! Though the French army were shattered, one heard Englishmen say that the British would create an army to wrest victory from defeat. The spirit of this was fine, but one realised the enormity of the task; should the mighty German machine crush the French machine, the Allies had lost. To say so then was heresy, when the world was inclined to think poorly of the French army and saw Russian numbers as irresistible.

The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be decided. My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the second, farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south, to Dieppe. Where next? To Havre! Events were moving with the speed which had been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown into battle by the quick march of the railroad trains.

Every event was hidden under the “fog of war,” then a current expression--meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their brief lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the lines. The marvel was that any but troop trains should run. All night in that third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris! Tired and preoccupied passengers; every one’s heart heavy; every one’s soul wrenched; every one prepared for the worst! You cared for no other man’s views; the one thing you wanted was no bad news. France had known that when the war came it would be to the death. From the first no Frenchman could have had any illusions. England had not realised yet that her fate was with the soldiers of France, or France that her fate and all the world’s was with the British fleet.

An Italian in our compartment would talk, however, and he would keep the topic down to red trousers, and to the red trousers of a French Territorial opposite with an index finger when his gesticulatory knowledge of the French language, which was excellent, came to the rescue of his verbal knowledge, which was poor. The Frenchman agreed that red trousers were a mistake, but pointed to the blue covering which he had for his cap--which made it all right. The Italian insisted on keeping to the trousers. He talked red trousers till the Frenchman got out at his station and then turned to me to confirm his views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After all, he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to write on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen to this sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men lay dead and wounded from that day’s fight on the soil of France. Red trousers were responsible for the death of a lot of them.

Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvests lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to a hotel with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking busily in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre’s request that every one should go on with his day’s work.

“They’re done!” said an American in the foyer. “The French could not stand up against the Germans--anybody anybody could see that! It’s too bad, but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the next day.”

I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all one’s belief in the French army and in the real character of the French people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of democracy; it meant disaster to all one’s precepts; a personal disaster.

“Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not had their battle yet!” I said.

And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with lots of fight left in it.

IV

PARIS WAITS

The Paris of the boulevards a dead city--How Marianne goes to war--
The Germans are coming!--Silence and darkness--Moonlight on
the Arc de Triomphe--Trust in Joffre and in the army--Turn
of the tide--Joffre’s _communiqués_ more definite--Positions
regained--The French in pursuit--Paris breathes again--A
Sunday of relief--Religious rejoicing at Nôtre Dame--Groups in
the cafés--The American Embassy “mobilised for war”--“In spite
of ’70, France still lived.”

It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city--a Paris without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the shutters of its shops down and its cafés and restaurants in gloomy emptiness.

The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller, the Paris of the boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist, the Paris that sparkled and smiled in entertainment, the Paris exploited to the average American through Sunday supplements and the reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead. Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no other Paris departed as from the tomb of the pleasures which had been the passing extravaganza of relief from dull lives elsewhere. The Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand francs to get her pet dog safely away to Marseilles. Politicians of a craven type, who are the curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her company, leaving Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had had their morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were in bloom and Madame was arranging her early editions on the table of her kiosk--a spiritually clean Paris.

Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way? What has the White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-second Street or Harlem? It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of furnishing scandalous little paragraphs for foreign newspapers. Foreigners visit it and think that they understand how Americans live in Stockbridge, Mass., or Springfield, Ill. Empty its hotels and nobody but sightseers and people interested in the White Way would know the difference.

The other Paris, making ready to stand siege, with the Government gone to Bordeaux with all the gold of the Bank of France, with the enemy’s guns audible in the suburbs and old men cutting down trees and tearing up paving-stones to barricade the streets--never had that Paris been more alive. It was after the death of the old and the birth of the new Paris that an elderly man, seeing a group of women at tea in one of the few fashionable refreshment places which were open, stopped and said:

“Can you find nothing better than that to do, ladies, in a time like this?”

And the Latin temperament gave the world a surprise. Those who judged France by her playful Paris thought that if a Frenchman gesticulated so emotionally in the course of every-day existence, he would get overwhelmingly excited in a great emergency. One evening, after the repulse of the Germans on the Marne, I saw two French reserves dining in a famous restaurant where, at this time of the year, four out of five diners ordinarily would be foreigners surveying one another in a study of Parisian life. They were big, rosy-cheeked men, country born and bred, belonging to the new France of sports, of action, of temperate habits, and they were joking about dining there just as two sturdy Westerners might about dining in a deserted Broadway. The foreigners and _demi-mondaines_ were noticeably absent; a pair of Frenchmen were in the place of the absentees; and after their dinner they smoked their black briar-root pipes in that fashionable restaurant.

Among the picture post-cards then on sale was one of Marianne, who is France, bound for the front in an aeroplane with a crowing French cock sitting on the brace above her. Marianne looked as happy as if she were going to the races; the cock as triumphant as if he had a spur through the German eagle’s throat. However, there was little sale for picture post-cards or other trifles, while Paris waited for the siege. They did not help to win victories. News and not _jeux d’esprit_, victory and not wit, was wanted.

For Marianne went to war with her liberty cap drawn tight over her brow, a beat in her temples, and her heart in her throat; and the cock had his head down and pointed at the enemy. She was relieved in a way, as all Europe was, that the thing had come; at last an end of the straining of competitive taxation and preparation; at last the test. She had no channel, as England had, between her and the foe. Defeat meant the heel of the enemy on her soil, German sentries in her streets, submission. Long and hard she had trained; while the outside world, thinking of the Paris of the boulevards, thought that she could not resist the Kaiser’s legions. She was effeminate, effete. She was all right to run cafés and make artificial flowers, but she lacked beef. All the prestige was with her enemy. In ’70 all the prestige had been with her. For there is no prestige like military prestige. It is all with those who won the last war.

“But if we must succumb, let it be now,” said the French.

On, on--the German corps were coming like some machine-controlled avalanche of armed men. Every report brought them a little nearer Paris. Ah, monsieur, they had numbers, those Germans! Every German mother has many sons; a French mother only one or two.

How could one believe those official _communiqués_ which kept saying that the position of the French armies was favourable and then admitted that von Kluck had advanced another twenty miles? The heart of Paris stopped beating. Paris held its breath. Perhaps the reason there was no panic was that Parisians had been prepared for the worst.

What silence! The old men and women in the streets moved as under a spell, which was the sense of their own helplessness. But few people were abroad, and those going on errands apparently. The absence of traffic and pedestrians heightened the sepulchral appearance to superficial observation. At the windows of flats, inside the little shops, and on by-streets, you saw waiting faces, every one with the weight of national grief become personal. Was Paris alive? Yes, if Paris is human and not bricks and stone. Every Parisian was living a century in a week. So, too, was one who loved France. In the prospect of its loss he realised the value of all that France stands for, her genius, her democracy, her spirit.

One recalled how German officers had said that the next war would be the end of France. An indemnity which would crush out her power of recovery would be imposed on her. Her northern ports would be taken. France, the most homogeneous of nations, would be divided into separate nationalities--even this the Germans had planned. Those who read their Shakespeare in the language they learned in childhood had no doubt of England’s coming out of the war secure; but if we thought which foreign civilisation brought us the most in our lives, it was that of France.

What would the world be without French civilisation? To think of France dead was to think of cells in your own brain that had gone lifeless; of something irreparably extinguished to every man to whom civilisation means more than material power of destruction. The sense of what might be lost appealed to you at every turn in scenes once merely characteristic of a whole, each with an appeal of its own now; in the types of people who, by their conduct in this hour of trial, showed that Spartan hearts might beat in Paris--the Spartan hearts of the mass of every-day, work-a-day Parisians.

Those waiting at home calmly with their thoughts, in a France of apprehension, knew that their fate was out of their hands in the hands of their youth. The tide of battle wavering from Meaux to Verdun might engulf them; it might recede; but Paris would resist to the last. That was something. She would resist in a manner worthy of Paris; and one could live on very little food. Their fathers had. Every day that Paris held out would be a day lost to the Germans and a day gained for Joffre and Sir John French to bring up reserves.

The street lamps should not reveal to Zeppelins or Taubes the location of precious monuments. You might walk the length of the Champs Élysées without meeting a vehicle or more than two or three pedestrians. The avenue was all your own; you might appreciate it as an avenue for itself; and every building and even the skyline of the streets you might appreciate, free of any association except the thought of the results of man’s planning and building. Silent, deserted Paris by moonlight, without street lamps--few had ever seen that. Millionaire tourists with retinues of servants following them in automobiles may never know this effect; nor the Parisienne who paid a thousand francs to send her pet dog to Marseilles.

The moonlight threw the Arc de Triomphe in exaggerated spectral relief, sprinkled the leaves of the long rows of trees, glistened on the upsweep of the broad pavements, gleamed on the Seine. Paris was majestic, as scornful of Prussian eagles as the Parthenon of Roman eagles. A column of soldiery marching in triumph under the Arch might possess as a policeman possesses; but not by arms could they gain the quality that made Paris, any more than the Roman legionary became a Greek scholar by doing sentry go in front of the Parthenon. Every Parisian felt anew how dear Paris was to him; how worthy of some great sacrifice!

If New York were in danger of falling to an enemy, the splendid length of Fifth Avenue and the majesty of the sky-scrapers of lower Broadway and the bay and the rivers would become vivid to you in a way they never had before; or Washington, or San Francisco, or Boston--or your own town. The thing that is a commonplace, when you are about to lose it takes on a cherished value.

To-morrow the German guns might be thundering in front of the fortifications. The _communiqués_ from Joffre became less frequent and more laconic. Their wording was like some trembling, fateful needle of a barometer, pausing, reacting a little, but going down, down, down, indicator of the heart-pressure of Paris, shrivelling the flesh, tightening the nerves. Already Paris was in siege, in one sense. Her exits were guarded against all who were not in uniform and going to fight; to all who had no purpose except to see what was passing where two hundred miles resounded with strife. It was enough to see Paris itself awaiting the siege; fighting one was yet to see to repletion.

The situation must be very bad or the Government would not have gone to Bordeaux. _Alors_, one must trust the army and the army must trust Joffre. There is no trust like that of a democracy when it gives its heart to a cause; the trust of the mass in the strength of the mass which sweeps away the middleman of intrigue.

And silence, only silence, in Paris; the silence of the old men and the women, and of children who had ceased to play and could not understand. No one might see what was going on unless he carried a rifle. No one might see even the wounded. Paris was spared this, isolated in the midst of war. The wounded were sent out of reach of the Germans in case they should come.

Then the indicator stopped falling. It throbbed upward. The _communiqués_ became more definite; they told of positions regained, and borne in the ether by the wireless of telepathy was something which confirmed the _communiqués_. At first Paris was uneasy with the news, so set had history been on repeating itself, so remorselessly certain had seemed the German advance. But it was true, true--the Germans were going, with the French in pursuit, now twenty, now thirty, now forty, now fifty, sixty, seventy miles away from Paris. Yes, monsieur, seventy!

With the needle rising, did Paris gather in crowds and surge through the streets, singing and shouting itself hoarse, as it ought to have done according to the popular international idea? No, monsieur, Paris will not riot in joy in the presence of the dead on the battlefields and while German troops are still within the boundaries of France. Paris, which had been with heart standing still and breathing hard, began to breathe regularly again and the glow of life to run through its veins. In the markets, whither Madame brought succulent melons, pears, and grapes with commonplace vegetables, the talk of bargaining housewives with their baskets had something of its old vivacity and Madame stiffened prices a little, for there will be heavy taxes to pay for the war. Children, so susceptible to surroundings, broke out of the quiet alleys and doorways in play again.

A Sunday of relief, with a radiant September sun shining, followed a Sunday of depression. The old taxicabs and the horse vehicles with their venerable steeds and drivers too old for service at the front, exhumed from the catacomb of the hours of doubt, ran up and down the Champs Élysées with airing parties. At Nôtre Dame the religious rejoicing was expressed. A great service of prayer was held by the priests who were not away fighting for France, as three thousand are, while joyful prayers of thanks shone on the faces of that democratic people who have not hesitated to discipline the church as they have disciplined their rulers. Groups gathered in the cafés or sauntered slowly, talking less than usual, gesticulating little, rolling over the good news in their minds as something beyond the power of expression. How banal to say, “_C’est chic, ça!_” or, “_C’est épatant!_” Language is for little things.

That pile of posters at the American Embassy was already historical souvenirs which won a smile. The name of every American resident in Paris and his address had been filled in the blank space. He had only to put up the warning over his door that the premises were under the Embassy’s protection. Ambassador Herrick, suave, decisive, resourceful, possessed the gift of acting in a great emergency with the same ease and simplicity as in a small one, which is a gift sometimes found wanting when a crisis breaks upon the routine of official life.

He had the courage to act and the ability to secure a favour for an American when it was reasonable; and the courage to say “No” if it were unreasonable or impracticable. No one of the throngs who had business with him was kept long at the door in uncertainty. In its organisation for facilitating the home-going of the thousands of Americans in Paris and the Americans coming to Paris from other parts of Europe, the American Embassy in Paris seemed as well mobilised for its part in the war as the German army.

In spite of ’70, France still lived. You noted the faces of the women in fresh black for their dead at the front, a little drawn but proud and victorious. The son or brother or husband had died for the country. When a fast automobile bearing officers had a German helmet or two displayed, the people stopped to look. A captured German in the flesh on a front seat beside a soldier chauffeur brought the knots to a standstill. “_Voilà! C’est un Allemand!_” ran the universal exclamation. But Paris soon became used to these stray German prisoners, left-overs from the German retreat coming in from the fields to surrender. The batches went through by train without stopping for Paris, southward to the camps where they were to be interned; and the trains of wounded to winter resorts, whose hotels became hospitals, the verandas occupied by convalescents instead of gossiping tourists. It is _très à la mode_ to be wounded, monsieur--_très à la mode_ all over Europe.

And, monsieur, all those barricades put up for nothing! They will not need the cattle gathered on Longchamps race-track and in the parks at Versailles for a siege. The people who laid in stocks of canned goods till the groceries of Paris were empty of everything in tins--they would either have to live on canned food or confess that they were pigs, _hein_? Those volunteers, whether young men who had been excused because they were only sons or for weak hearts which now let them past the surgeons, whether big, hulking farmers, or labourers, or stooped clerks, drilling in awkward squads in the suburbs till they are dizzy, they will not have to defend Paris; but, perhaps, help to regain Alsace and Lorraine.

Then there were stories going the rounds; stories of French courage and _élan_ which were cheering to the ears of those who had to remain at home. Did you hear about the big French peasant soldier who captured a Prussian eagle in Alsace? They had him come to Paris to give him the Legion of Honour and the great men made a ceremony of it, gathering around him at the Ministry of War. The simple fellow looked from one to another of the group, surprised at all this attention. It did not occur to him that he had done anything remarkable. He had seen a Prussian with a standard and taken the standard away from that Prussian.

“If you like this so well,” said that droll one, “I’ll try to get another!”

_C’est un vrai Français_, that _garçon_. What?

V

ON THE HEELS OF VON KLUCK

An excursion to the front--The magic of a military pass--The
high-water mark of German shells--Return of the refugees--
Fate of the villages--War’s results--Burying the dead--The
victorious spirit of France--Approaching the line--Roll
and smoke of the guns--Passing the motor transports--Army
organisation--Line reserves--Newspapers and tobacco--Soissons
deserted--Stoicism of the townspeople--German prisoners--The
Sixth Army headquarters--A town in ruins--Character of French
women--French democracy and humanity.

Though the Germans were going, the siege by the cordon of French guards around Paris had not been raised. To them every civilian was a possible spy. So they let no civilians by. Must one remain forever in Paris, screened from any view of the great drama? Was there no way of securing a blue card which would open the road to war for an atom of humanity who wanted to see Frenchmen in action and not to pry into generals’ plans?

Happily, an army winning is more hospitable than an army losing; and bonds of friendship which stretch around the world could be linked with authority which has only to say the word in order that one might have a day’s glimpse of the fields where von Kluck’s Germans were showing their heels to the French.

Ours, I think, was the pioneer of the sightseeing parties which afterward became the accepted form of war correspondence with the French. None could have been under more delightful auspices in companionship or in the event. Victory was in the hearts of our hosts, who included M. Paul Doumer, formerly president of the Chamber of Deputies and governor of French Indo-China and now a senator, and General Fevrier, of the French Medical Service, who was to have had charge of the sanitation of Paris in case of a siege.

M. Doumer was acting as _Chef de Cabinet_ to General Gallieni, the commandant of Paris, and he and General Fevrier and two other officers of Gallieni’s staff, who would have been up to their eyes in work if there had been a siege, wanted to see something of that army whose valour had given them a holiday. Why should not Roberts and myself come along? which is the pleasant way the French have of putting an invitation.

The other member of the party was the veteran European correspondent and representative of the Associated Press in Paris, Elmer Roberts, who would not be doing his duty to Melville E. Stone if he did not arrange for opportunities of this kind. I was really hanging onto Roberts’s coat-tails. Other men may have publicity as individuals in a single newspaper or magazine, but the readers of a thousand newspapers take their news from Paris through him without knowing his name.

Oh, the magic of a military pass and the companionship of an officer in uniform! It separates you from the crowd of millions on the other side of the blank wall of military secrecy and takes you into the area of the millions in uniform; it wins a nod of consent from that middle-aged reservist on a road whose bayonet has the police power of millions of bayonets in support of its authority.

At last one was to see; the measure of his impressions was to be his own eyes and not the written reports. Other passes I have had since, which gave me the run of trenches and shell-fire areas; but this pass opened the first door to the war. That day we ran by Meaux and to Château Thierry to Soissons and back by Senlis to Paris. We saw a finger’s breadth of battle area; a pin point of army front. Only a ride along a broad, fine road out of Paris, at first; a road which our cars had all to themselves. Then at Claye we came to the high-water mark of the German invasion. This close to Paris in that direction and no closer had the Germans come.

There was the field where the skirmishers had turned back. Farther on, the branches of the avenue of trees which shaded the road had been slashed as if by a whirlwind of knives, where the French _soixante-quinze_ field guns had found a target. Under that sudden bath of projectiles, with the French infantry pressing forward on their front, the German gunners could not wait to take away the cord of five-inch shells which they had piled to blaze their way to Paris. One guessed their haste and their irritation. They were within range of the fortifications; within two hours’ march of the suburbs of the Mecca of forty years of preparation. After all that march from Belgium, with no break in the programme of success, the thunders broke and lightning flashed out of the sky as Manoury’s army rushed upon von Kluck’s flank.

“It was not the way that they wanted us to get the shells,” said a French peasant, who was taking one of the shell baskets for a souvenir. It would make an excellent umbrella stand.

For the French it had been the turn of the tide; for that little British army which had fought its way back from Mons it was the sweet dream, which had kept men up on the retreat, come true. Weary Germans, after a fearful two weeks of effort, became the driven. Weary British and French turned drivers. A hypodermic of victory renewed their energy. Paris was at their back and the German backs in front. They were no longer leaving their dead and wounded behind to the foe; they were sweeping past the dead and wounded of the foe.

But their happiness, that of a winning action, exalted and passionate, had not the depths of that of the refugees who had fled before the German hosts and were returning to their homes in the wake of their victorious army. We passed farmers with children perched on top of carts laden with household goods and drawn by broad-backed farm-horses, with usually another horse or a milch cow tied behind. The real power of France these peasants, holding fast to the acres they own, with the fire of the French nature under their thrifty conservatism. Others on foot were villagers who had lacked horses or carts to transport their belongings. In the packs on their backs were a few precious things which they had borne away and were now bearing back.

Soon they would know what the Germans had done to their homes. What the Germans had done to one piano was evident. It stood in the yard of a house where grass and flowers had been trodden by horses and men. In the sport of victory the piano had been dragged out of the little drawing-room, while Fritz and Hans played and sang in the intoxication of a Paris gained, a France in submission. They did not know what Joffre had in pickle for them. It had all gone according to programme up to that moment. Nothing can stop us Germans! Champagne instead of beer! Set the glass on top of the piano and sing! Haven’t we waited forty years for this day?

Captured diaries of German officers, which reflect the seventh heaven of elation suddenly turned into grim depression, taken in connection with what one saw on the battlefield, reconstruct the scene around that piano. The cup to the lips; then dashed away. How those orders to retreat must have hurt!

The state of the refugees’ homes all depended upon the chances of war. War’s lightning might have hit your roof tree and it might not. It plays no favourites between the honest and the dishonest; the thrifty and the shiftless. We passed villages which exhibited no signs of destruction or of looting. The German troops had marched through in the advance and in the retreat without being billeted. A hurrying army with another on its heels has no time for looting. Other villages had been points of topical importance; they had been in the midst of a fight. General _Mauvaise Chance_ had it in for them. Shells had wrecked some houses; others were burned. Where a German non-commissioned officer came to the door of a French family and said that room must be made for German soldiers in that house and if any one dared to interfere with them he would be shot, there the exhausted human nature of a people trained to think that “_Krieg ist Krieg_” and that the spoils of war are to the victor had its way.

It takes generations to lift a man up a single degree; but so swift is the effect of war, when men live a day in a year, that he is demonised in a month. Before the occupants had to go, often windows were broken, crockery smashed, closets and drawers rifled. The soldiery which could not have its Paris “took it out” of the property of their hosts. Looting, destruction, one can forgive in the orgy of war which is organised destruction; one can even understand rapine and atrocities when armies, which include latent vile and criminal elements, are aroused to the kind of insane passion which war arouses in human beings. But some indecencies one could not understand in civilised men. All with a military purpose, it is said; for in the nice calculations of a staff system which grinds so very fine, nothing must be excluded that will embarrass the enemy. A certain foully disgusting practice was too common not to have the approval of at least some officers, whose conduct in several châteaus includes them as accomplices. Not all officers, not all soldiers. That there should be a few is enough to sicken you of belonging to the human species. Nothing worse in Central America; nothing worse where civilised degeneracy disgraces savagery.

But do not think that destruction for destruction’s sake was done in all houses where German soldiers were billeted. If the good principle was not sufficiently impressed, Belgium must have impressed it; a looting army is a disorderly army. The soldier has burden enough to carry in heavy marching order without souvenirs. That collector of the glass tops of carafes who had thirty on his person when taken prisoner was bound to be a laggard in the retreat.

To their surprise and relief, returning farmers found their big, conical haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to the wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes the harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to save the forage for their own horses, and either they were running too fast to stop or the staff overlooked the detail on the retreat.

It was amazing how few signs of battle there were in the open. Occasionally one saw the hastily made shelter trenches of a skirmish line; and again, the emplacements for batteries--hurried field emplacements, so puny beside those of trench warfare. It had been open fighting; the tide of an army sweeping forward and then, pursued, sweeping back. One side was trying to get away; the other to overtake. Here, a rearguard made a determined action which would have had the character of a battle in other days; there, a rearguard was pinched as the French or the British got around it.

Swift marching and quick manœuvres of the type which gave war some of its old sport and zest; the advance, all the while gathering force, like the deep tide! Crowds of men hurrying across a harvested wheat-field or a pasture after all leave few marks of passage. A day’s rain will wash away the blood stains and liven trampled vegetation. Nature hastens with a kind of contempt of man to repair the damage done by his murderous wrath.

The cyclone past, the people turned out to put things in order. Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the rifles and guns and hell-fire, were moving across the fields with spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that were war’s victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of battle had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered mounds of fresh earth where they were light; and sometimes, when the burying was unfinished--well, one draws the curtain over scenes like that in the woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that Paris was saved and Germans died knowing that they had failed to take Paris.

Whenever we halted our statesman, M. Doumer, was active. Did we have difficulties over a culvert which had been hastily mended, he was out of the car and in command. Always he was meeting some man whom he knew and shaking hands like a senator at home. At one place a private soldier, a man of education by his speech, came running across the street at sight of him.

“Son of an old friend of mine, from my town,” said our statesman. Being a French private meant being any kind of a Frenchman. All inequalities are levelled in the ranks of a great conscript army.

Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and shelled, the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their eyes. Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to our car in holiday spirit. The laugh of a sturdy young woman who threw some flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of victorious France-- France after forty years’ waiting throwing back a foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields and neat gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling landscape, basked in victory. Dead the spirit of any one who could not, for the time being, catch the infection of it and feel himself a Frenchman. Far from the Paris of gay show for the tourist one seemed; in the midst of the France of the farms and the villages which had saved Paris and France.

The car sped on over the hard road. Staff officers in other cars whom we passed alone suggested that there was war somewhere ahead. Were we never going to reach the battle-line, the magnet of our speed when a French army chauffeur made all speed laws obsolete!

Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought to our ears the thunder of guns, the firing so rapid that it was like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size of ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an open sweep of parklike country toward wooded hills. As far as we could see against the background of the foliage throwing it into relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from bursting shrapnel shells, renewed with fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.

This, then, was a battle. No soldiers, no guns in sight; only a diaphanous, man-made nimbus against masses of autumn green which was raining steel hail. Ten miles of this, one would say; and under it lines of men in blue coats and red trousers and green uniforms hugging the earth, as unseen as a battalion of ants at work in the tall grass. Even if a charge swept across a field one would have been able to detect nothing except moving pin-points on a carpet.

There was hard fighting; a lot of French and Germans were being killed in the direction of Compiègne and Noyon to-day. Another dip into another valley and the thir-r-r of a rapid-firer and the muffled firing of a line of infantry were audible. Yes, we were getting up with the army, with one tiny section of it operating along the road we were on. Multiply this by a thousand and you have the whole.

Ahead was the army’s stomach on wheels; a procession of big motor transport trucks keeping their intervals of distance with the precision of a battleship fleet at sea. We should have known that they belonged to the army by the deafness of the drivers to appeals to let us pass. All army transports are like that. What the deuced right has anybody to pass? They are the transport, and only fighting men belong in front of them. Our automobile in trying to go by to one side got stuck in a rut that an American car, built for bad roads, would have made nothing of; which proves again how clearly European armies are tied to their fine roads. We got out, and here was our statesman putting his shoulder to the wheel again. That is the way of the French in war. Everybody tries to help. By this time the transport chauffeurs also remembered that they were Frenchmen; and as Frenchmen are polite even in time of war, they let us by.

A motor-cyclist approached with his hand up.

“Stop here!” he called.

Those transport chauffeurs who were deaf to ex-premiers heard instantly and obeyed. In front of them was a line of single horse-drawn carts, with an extra horse in the rear. They could take paths that the motor-trucks could not. Archaic they seemed, yet friendly, as a relic of how armies were fed in other days. For the first time I was realising what the automobile means to war. It brings the army impedimenta close up to the army’s rear; it means a reduction of road space occupied by transport by three-quarters; ease in keeping pace with food with the advance, speed in falling back in case of retreat.

All that day I did not see a single piece of French army transport broken down. And this army had been fighting for weeks; it had been an army on the road. The valuable part of our experience was exactly in this: a glimpse of an army in action after it had been through all the vicissitudes that an army may have in marching and counter-marching and attack. Order one was to expect afterwards behind the siege line of trenches when there had been time to establish a routine; organisation and smooth organisation you had here at the climax of a month’s strain. It told the story of the character of the French army and the reasons for its success other than its courage. The brains were not all with the German Staff.

That winding road, with a new picture at every turn, now revealed the town of Soissons in the valley of the River Aisne. Soissons was ours, we knew, since yesterday. How much farther had we gone? Was our advance still continuing? For then, the winter trench-fighting was unforeseen and the sightseers thought of the French army as following up success with success. Paris, rising from gloom to optimism, hoped to see the Germans put out of France. The appetite for victory grew after a week’s bulletins which moved the flags forward on the map every day.

Another turn and Soissons was hidden from view by a woodland. Here we came upon what looked like a leisurely family party of reserves. The French army, a small section of French army along a road! And thus, if one would see the whole it must be in bits along the roads when not on the firing-line. They were sprawling in the fields in the genial afternoon sun, looking as if they had no concern except to rest. Uniforms dusty and faces tanned and bearded told their story of the last month.

The duty of a portion of a force is always to wait on what is being done by the others at the front. These were waiting near a forks which could take them to the right or the left, as the situation demanded. At their rear, their supply of small arms ammunition; in front, caissons of shells for a battery speaking from the woods near by; a troop of cavalry drawn up, the men dismounted, ready; and ahead of them more reserves ready; everything ready.

This was where the general wanted the body of men and equipment to be, and here they were. There were no dragging ends in the rear, so far as I could see; nobody complaining that food or ammunition was not up; no aide looking for somebody who could not be found; no excited staff officer rushing about shouting for somebody to look sharp for somebody had made a mistake. The thing was unwarlike; it was like a particularly well-thought-out route march. Yet at the word that company of cavalry might be in the thick of it, at the point where they were wanted; the infantry rushing to the support of the firing-line; the motor transport facing around for withdrawal, if need be. It was only a little way, indeed, into the zone of death from the rear of that compact column.

Thousands of such compact bodies on as many roads, each seemingly a force by itself and each a part of the whole, which could be a dependable whole only when every part was ready, alert, and up where it belonged! Nothing can be left to chance in a battle-line three hundred miles long. The general must know what to depend on, mile by mile, in his plans. Millions of human units are grouped in increasingly larger units, harmonised according to set forms. The most complex of all machines is that of a vast army, which yet must be kept most simple. No unit acts without regard to the others; every one must know how to do his part. The parts of the machine are standardised. One is like the other in training, uniform, and every detail, so that one can replace another. Oldest of all trades this of war; old experts the French. What one saw was like manœuvres. It must be like manœuvres or the army would not hold together. Manœuvres are to teach armies coherence; war tries out that coherence, which you may not have if some one does not know just what to do; if he is uncertain in his rôle. Haste leads to confusion; haste is only for supreme moments. In order to know how to hasten when the hurry call comes, the mighty organism must move in its routine with the smoothness of a well-rehearsed play.

Joffre and the others who directed the machine must know more than the mechanics of staff-control. They must know the character of the man-material in the machine. It was their duty as real Frenchmen to understand Frenchmen, their verve, their restlessness for the offensive, their individualism, their democratic intelligence, the value of their elation, the drawback of their tendency to depression and to think for themselves. Indeed, the leader must counteract the faults of his people and make the most of their virtues.

Thus, we had a French army’s historical part reversed: a French army falling back and concentrating on the Marne to receive the enemy blow. Equally alive to German racial traits, the German Staff had organised in their mass offensive the _élan_ which means fast marching and hard blows. Thus, we found the supposedly excitable French digging in to receive the onslaught of the supposedly phlegmatic German. When the time came for the charge--ah, you can always depend on a Frenchman to charge!

Those reserves were pawns on a chessboard. They appeared like it; one thought that they realised it. Their individual intelligence and democracy had reasoned out the value of obedience and homogeneity, rather than accepted the dictum of any war lord. Difficult to think that each had left a vacancy at a family board; difficult to think that they were not automatons in a process of endless routine of war; but not difficult to learn that they were Frenchmen once we had thrown our bombs in the midst of the group.