A final long and enforced wait at last made it apparent that the sound was, if anything, coming nearer in this quarter. The Germans might be pushing a counter-attack southward. In any case, further progress would have been hazardous.
The retreat was like the advance. Glimpses of moving men through the trees; long waits; distant knots of ambulance men waiting, or moving southward. Always the confusing echo of firing, sometimes silent for intervals, sometimes clear and close as the south-west wind lulled. So back and over the Oise, with a big leafy branch to cover my drift across the river.
It was, frankly, a relief to rejoin my moving base, doing ambulance duty at Estrées, and to be on the clear road again. As I left the river, several barges of wounded were moving slowly southward. The little columns of Red Cross motors held the roads. This has been a terribly costly battle. We have held our own magnificently, but it has been against superior numbers, backed by accurate shell-fire from strongly-entrenched positions.
Unless the line can be pierced on the east, the great hope, thus limiting the Germans to the few lines of communications to the northern "troué," and unless their western lines can be seriously threatened from the north-west or in Belgium, we may look for a long, wearing winter campaign, a "stalemate" in the present positions. But a good deal has still to happen before we need make up our minds for that.
Creil, Monday.
I have been now once again making south, to resume contact with the battle along the Aisne. You have heard the account of the melancholy condition of the country north of and around Meaux, and of the ruins of Senlis.
Creil is in little better state. This was one point at which the tremendous German march upon Paris was first checked, to swing, with lost momentum, south and east, and then recoil.
The roads to the north and east bear the usual signs of past warfare. Wayside entrenchments, significantly enough often facing north-west, as if the Germans, when they checked, had half prepared to meet attack from that quarter. Hastily obliterated milestones and sign-posts. Villages with a house here and there destroyed. At Cauffry, for instance, the big Mairie is burnt out, nothing else touched.
Entering Creil from the north, at first only every house in four or five seems to have been injured. Further down towards the river, every second house; and then whole rows of empty shells, shattered by bombardment, burnt out with fire. Others still standing, with every window broken and the doors smashed in; pillaged and scooped out, as if by the enormous paw of some predatory beast. In the cold autumn wind and driving rain the inhabitants are sheltering in the empty frameworks, doorless, windowless, often roofless. The town is full of the usual tales of suffering. The boy scout, who piloted me, grew passionate over the long tale of a lady called la belle Andaluse. It embodied all the atrocities; with the single exception of the now dubitable anecdote of the "little boy who was shot because he pointed his toy gun at a soldier." For any one who has read the story of Napoleon's campaign in this district, in 1814, and of the Cossack atrocities perpetrated among these villagers, it has a grim meaning to hear, in 1914, their descendants in the same villages recounting, unknowingly, much the same catalogue of outrages. Civilisation will seem to bray at him, like a donkey running round in a well-wheel.
In the grey chilly evening the river dividing the town is a melancholy sight. The two twisted ends of the great girder bridge, blown up by the French on their retreat, droop into the broad river. Below this, still survives the remains of the German pontoon bridge, by which they crossed. A big ferry further down makes the only connection with the region north-west of the Oise for a number of miles.