We left Paris on the evening train for the Spanish border. Newspaper men taking flashlights and "poilus" in uniform crowded the station platform as the train with our still numerous party pulled out.
How France has disappointed German expectations! France to-day is not the France that calls out, "We are betrayed," and runs away after the failure of its first assault. France to-day is a calm France that seeks out its traitors, and deliberately punishes them, that organises with an efficiency we once thought a Prussian monopoly, a France that bleeds but fights on, a France that, standing with its back to its beloved, sunny fields, with many of her dearest sons dead, facing the Kaiser across No Man's Land, cries boldly, bravely to the world, the war cry of Verdun, "They shall not pass!"
But even while war goes on, even while the French poilus hold fast the long battle line, the French people are beset within by agents of the Kaiser. Face to face they are with the secret agents, the spies, the informers, the buyers of newspapers and of public men, the traffickers in honour who, behind French citizenship or neutral passports, seek to divide France, to make the soldier at the front feel that he is betrayed by traitors at home, to render the French distrustful and suspicious of each other and thus to strike as mortal a blow at the French defence as was attempted at Verdun.
Bolo Pasha and all his tribe slip past trench and barbed wire and do more damage than a German army corps to the cause of Liberty.
CHAPTER XIX
MY INTERVIEW WITH THE KING OF SPAIN
Neutrals—how obsolete the word seems!
Yet there are some nations in Europe which will remain neutral no matter how great the hardship. How much this is due to inherent weaknesses of government, fears that the people may acquire too much of the infectious spirit of liberalism that war brings and thereby overthrow royalty, is hard to judge. But I must say that Kaiserism has omitted no word or act to impress upon the royalty of those countries, which might otherwise be inclined to aid the entente, the advantages to them of keeping out of the war unless they become allies of Germany.
You will meet Kaiserism in Spain and the other neutral countries of Europe as much as you will in Austria or Bulgaria or Turkey. I do not mean that Spain, for instance, is by any means an ally of Germany, but I do mean that the German propagandist has had free rein.