HEROIC EFFORTS OF FRENCH SOLDIERS
I saw regiment after regiment entraining. Men from the Southern Provinces, speaking the patois of the South; men from the Eastern Departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war, at Châlons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and center of France, in garrisons along the Loire. They were all in splendid spirits and utterly undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance.
“It is nothing, my little one,” said a dirty, unshaved gentleman with the laughing eyes of a D’Artagnan; “we shall bite their heads off. These brutal ‘bosches’ are going to put themselves in a ‘guet-apens,’ a veritable death-trap. We shall have them at last.”
Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the Vosges. The youngest of them had bristling beards, their blue coats with turned-back flaps were war-worn and flanked with the dust of long marches; their red trousers were sloppy and stained, but they had not forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their spirits was a joy to see.
They are very proud, these French soldiers, of fighting side by side with their old foes. The English now, after long centuries of strife, from Edward, the Black Prince, to Wellington, are their brothers-in-arms upon the battle-fields, and because I am English they offered me their cigarettes and made me one of them. But I realized even then that the individual is of no account in this inhuman business of war.
It is only masses of men that matter, moved by common obedience at the dictation of mysterious far-off powers, and I thanked Heaven that masses of men were on the move rapidly in vast numbers and in the right direction to support the French lines which had fallen back from Amiens a few hours before I left that town, and whom I had followed in their retirement, back and back, with the English always strengthening their left, but retiring with them almost to the outskirts of Paris itself.
Only this could save Paris—the rapid strengthening of the allied front by enormous reserves strong enough to hold back the arrow-shaped battering ram of the enemy’s main army.
Undoubtedly the French headquarters staff was working heroically and with fine intelligence to save the situation at the very gates of Paris. The country was being swept absolutely clean of troops in all parts of France, where they had been waiting as reserves.
It was astounding to me to see, after those three days of rushing troop trains and of crowded stations not large enough to contain the regiments, how an air of profound solitude and peace had taken possession of all these routes.
In my long journey through and about France and circling round Paris I found myself wondering sometimes whether all this war had not been a dreadful illusion without reality, and a transformation had taken place, startling in its change, from military turmoil to rural peace.