"As he spoke, there was a movement in the crowd. A compact body of about forty ambulance men marched through, into the open space before the station. Some of them were carrying stretchers. They looked grave and anxious. Some of their faces were tense and white, as if they too were expecting something, something they almost dreaded to see. This was very early in the war, remember, before we knew what to expect from these trains.
"The gates of the station swung open. The ambulance men marched in. A stream of motor ambulances followed. Then the gates were closed again.
"I waited, with the waiting crowd, for half an hour. It was impossible now to make one's way through the dense crush. From where I stood, jammed back against the iron railings, in front of the station, I could see that all the traffic in the Strand was blocked. The busses were halted, and the passengers were standing up on the top, like spectators in some enormous crowded theater. The police had more and more difficulty in keeping the open space before the station. At last, the gates were swung apart again, and the strangest procession that London had ever seen began to come out.
"First, there were the sitting-up cases—four soldiers to a taxicab, many of them still bandaged about the brows with the first blood-stained field dressings. Most of them sat like princes, and many of them were smiling; but all had a new look in their faces. Officers went by, gray-faced; and the measure of their seriousness seemed to be the measure of their intelligence, rather than that of their wounds. Without the utterance of a word, the London crowd began to feel that here was a new thing. The army of Britain was making its great fighting retreat, before some gigantic force that had brought this new look into the faces of the soldiers. It was our first real news from the front. From the silent faces of these men who had met the first onset with their bodies, we got our first authentic account of the new guns and the new shells, and the new hell that had been loosed over Europe.
"But the crowd had not yet fully realized it. A lad in khaki came capering out of the station, waving his hands to the throng and shouting something that sounded like a music-hall jest. The crowd rose to what it thought was the old familiar occasion.
"'Hello, Tommy! Good boy, Tommy! Shake hands, Tommy! Are we downhearted, Tommy?' The old vacuous roar began and, though all the faces near me seemed to have two eyes in them, every one began to look cheerful again.
"The capering soldier stopped and looked at them. Then he made a grotesque face, and thrust his tongue out. He looked more like a gargoyle than a man.
"The shouts of 'Tommy, Tommy,' still continued, though a few of the shouters were evidently puzzled. Then a brother soldier, with his left arm in the sling, took the arm of the comedian, and looked a little contemptuously at the crowd.
"'Shell-shock,' he said quietly. And the crowd shouted no more that day. It was not a pleasant mistake; and it was followed by a procession of closed ambulances, containing the worst cases.
"Then came something newer even than wounded men, a motley stream of civilians, the Belgian refugees. They came out of the station like a flock of sheep, and the fear of the wolf was still in their eyes. The London crowd was confronted by this other crowd, so like itself, a crowd of men in bowler hats and black coats, of women with children clinging to their skirts; and it was one of the most dramatic meetings in history. The refugees were carrying their household goods with them, as much as could be tied in a bundle or shut in a hand-bag. Some of the women were weeping. One of them—I heard afterwards—had started with four children but had been separated from the eldest in the confusion of their flight. It was doubtful whether they would ever be re-united.