Never in modern times, not in our generation at least, had Europe seen anything like that flight—nothing so strange, so overwhelming, so pitiful. And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical women, desperate, trampling men, tears and screams. In all those miles one saw neither complaining nor protestation—at times one might almost have thought it some vast, eccentric picnic. No, it was their orderliness, their thrift and kindness, their unmistakable usefulness, which made the waste and irony of it all so colossal and hideous. Each family had its big, round loaves of bread and its pile of hay for the horses, the bags of pears and potatoes; the children had their little dolls, and you would see some tired mother with her big bundle under one arm and some fluffy little puppy in the other. You could not associate them with forty-centimetre shells or burned churches and libraries or anything but quiet homes and peaceable, helpful lives. You could not be swept along by that endless stream of exiles and retain at the end of the day any particular enthusiasm for the red glory of war. And when we crossed the Dutch border that afternoon and came on a village street full of Belgian soldiers cut off and forced to cross the line, to be interned here, presumably until the war was over, one could not mourn very deeply their lost chances of martial glory as they unslung their rifles and turned them over to the good-natured Dutch guard. They had held back that avalanche long enough, these Belgians, and one felt as one would to see lost children get home again or some one dragged from under the wheels.
Chapter V
Paris Again—And Bordeaux: Journal of a Flight from a London Fogs
These notes began in a London fog and ended in the south of France. I had hoped, on reaching Calais, to work in toward the fighting along the Yser, but, finding it impossible, decided to turn about and travel away from the front instead of toward it—down to see Bordeaux while it was still the temporary capital, and to see what life might be like in the French provincial towns in war time.
It was not, so the young woman at the hotel desk in London said, what you would call a fog, because she could still see the porter at the street-door—yet day after day the same rain, smoky mist, and unbroken gloom.
One breakfasted and tramped the streets by lamplight, as if there were no such thing as sun—-recalled vaguely a world in which it used to be— woods with the leaves turning, New York on a bright autumn morning, enchanted tropical dawns.
Through this viscous envelope—a sort of fungi thrown off by it— newspapers kept appearing—slaughter and more slaughter, hatred, the hunt for spies, more hysterical and shrill. One looked for fairness almost as for the sun, and, merely by blackguarding long enough men who could not answer back and, after all, were flinging their lives away bravely over there in France, one ended by giving them the very qualities they were denied.
They faded out as one picture on a stereopticon screen fades into another—even as one read "Huns" for the thousandth time the Huns turned into kindly burghers smoking pipes and singing songs. In the same way the England of tradition—Shakespeare, Dickens, Meredith, jolly old rumbling London, rides 'cross country, rows on the river—faded into this nightmare of hate and smoky lamplight. The psychology was very simple, but too much, it seems, for censors and even editors. And, unfortunately, at a time like this not the light-hearted, sportsmanlike fighting men at the front, nor sober people left behind in homes, but newspapers are likely to be an outsider's most constant companions.
A sort of spiritual asphyxiation overtook one at last, in which the mere stony Briticism of the London hotel seemed to have a part. If you awoke again into that taste of soft-coal smoke, went down to another of those staggering lamp-lit breakfasts. But why staggering? "Can you not take coffee and rolls in London as well as in some Paris café"? It would seem so, yet it cannot be done. The mere sight and sound—or lack of sound— of that warm, softly carpeted breakfast-room, moving like some gloomy, inevitable mechanism as it has moved for countless years, attacks the already weakened will like an opiate. At the first bewildering '"Q?" from that steely-fronted maid the ritual overpowers you and you bow before porridge, kippers, bacon and eggs, stewed fruit, marmalade, toast, more toast, more marmalade, as helpless as the rabbit before the proverbial boa—except that in this case the rabbit swallows its own asphyxiator.
Another breakfast like this, another day of rain and fog, another '"Q?" —it was in some such state of mind as this that I packed up one night and took the early train for Folkestone.