From the Trenches: Louvain to the Aisne, the First Record of an Eye-Witness

by Geoffrey Winthrop Young

As we neared Calais the cloud began to pass. The men clustered and spoke together: a few started singing. When I had crossed a few days before, the quay had been lined with the usual cheering children, and a few condescending tourists had waved back. Now there was a line of soldiers in the same place. Our passengers rushed to the side and cheered them. A number of French cruisers guarded the entrance. It was the first real proof that we were passing into the facts of war. The odd nightmare feeling of those few first days, that witnessed the collapse of the structure of civilisation upon which our lives had hitherto rested, intensified. The war was true after all; not merely a terrible darkness of sensation into which we kept waking up, with a shrinking discomfort, whenever our attention came back from reading some book or following some ordinary chain of thought.

At Calais there had been no regular train traffic for three days. A number of travellers who had got as far as Calais on previous days decided to return by our boat to England. The porters stood round vaguely, with the distracted strained look that we learned to associate later with the presence of the war atmosphere. I discovered to my surprise a train waiting in the station with steam up:—it was "Lord Kitchener's Special," prepared to carry him on his way to Egypt. But Lord Kitchener at the last moment had not come, for reasons that have since proved amply sufficient. By various persuasive arguments we at last convinced the undecided station-master that as the line had been cleared the express might run through; and we reached Paris in four hours; the "last" unofficial express during the war.

The Gare du Nord was empty of porters; but the long lines of platform were piled ten feet high down the centre with enormous trunks—the abandoned luggage of escaping tourists.

Outside the station the approaches were barred by barriers, where dragoons demanded passes from every foot passenger. Troops poured past, starting for their different centres of concentration. The suburban traffic had ceased. The streets were full of people kept in the town against their will by the demands of the mobilisation.

Paris had not yet settled down. It was seething in those first three days of panic that seemed throughout Europe to follow the declaration of war. More an atmospheric feeling than a state with definite symptoms. People, for these days, seemed to be moving and speaking semi-consciously, with the nervous suggestion in their faces that they expected something novel and shocking to happen at any second. The supposed German shops and houses were being wrecked and looted. Every now and then there was a hurried rush of feet through the street, as some suspect was hunted or maltreated. The spy-hunting mania seems to have been a universal infection during this time. The disorderly elements in the big towns got the upper hand for the moment and the cold-blooded brutality of these silent man-hunts was to me infinitely more shocking than the sight and sound of the more terrible destruction on the battlefields. It was the first growl of the beast that we had let loose, the savage animal in man waking for our purposes of war. Under my window was a great courtyard, in which hundreds of German and Austrian men, women and children were confined for their protection. They had to sleep on the stones in the open air; and it was a pitiable thing, while the crowds outside the gate were execrating and hustling those who were thrust in to join them, to hear them singing French songs and cheering for France. Most of them were French by education and sympathy, and only German by extraction.

The apache element, which had been encouraged by the thinning out of the Gendarmerie for military service to make patriotism the cover for convenient looting and brutality, was soon brought into order. Cavalry pickets patrolled the streets in the evening; a curious sight, their horses trampling on the pavement of the Rue de la Paix. The worst haunts were raided; many hundreds were arrested, and the police in large motor wagons ran through deserted quarters, stopping and pouncing in batches upon suspected passers-by. The civil hand had released its hold, and it was a day or two before the new military administration could get a firm grip. Government offices were in a not unnatural state of confusion—they had been weakened by the withdrawal of a large proportion of their effective staff, at the same moment that they became responsible for an enormous mass of novel duty. The civilian, under military government, found himself of a sudden unable to move or exist without official permits. The whole social structure had to be reorganised, and the offices were crowded with jostling individuals asking for permissions and explanations which the over-worked officials were unable to supply. One of the most painful memories of the war was the sight of refined-looking Austrians and Germans, men and women, artists and writers, with the puzzled hunted expression of people in a nightmare, forced to appeal in public to hurrying footmen and office boys for some indulgence that might allow them to continue to earn their living.

The guiding principle of most public offices at this time, not only in Paris, seemed to be that of sending people backward and forward until their endurance should wear out. With what should happen to them in case they did not comply with all the new regulations the military outlook was not concerned. Every effort was to be concentrated on the preparation for war. The civilian in such an atmosphere has no further rights. If we permit, as nations, the whole civilised order of existence to be pitched into a whirlpool of primitive passions, we must expect to have to scuffle personally for our life-belts.

On the third day of my stay in Paris the situation was indescribably relieved by the declaration of war between England and Germany. The rush on the banks stopped. Prices fell. Money became easier, and the crowd of British and other tourists, sitting on their boxes in nervous lines before the Consulates, diminished. The growing hostility of the Parisians to ourselves disappeared. The organization in the responsible offices, in so far as the public was concerned, began to assume some order.

Night and day the regiments passed through and round the city. The mobilisation was rapid and extremely orderly. There was no apparent hitch. We became confident that the prophecies that France would be found unprepared would be proved totally wrong. Gradually the requisitioned cabs and trams began to reappear in the streets. The women quietly stepped into the men's places as ticket-collectors, etc. With reduced numbers and closed shops, a graver population took up its ordinary life.