Four hundred thousand people were in flight from Antwerp, into which big shells were falling, as English correspondents flattened themselves against the walls and said, “God in heaven!” Two hundred and fifty thousand people coming across the Scheldt in rowing-boats, sailing-craft, rafts, invaded one village in Holland. They had no food. Children were mad with fright. Young mothers had no milk in their breasts. It was cold at night and there were only a few canal-boats and fishermen's cottages, and in them were crowds of fugitives. The odor of human filth exuded from them, as I smell it now, and sicken in remembrance....
Then Dixmude was in flames, and Pervyse, and many other towns from the Belgian coast to Switzerland. In Dixmude young boys of France—fusiliers marins—lay dead about the Grande Place. In the Town Hall, falling to bits under shell-fire, a colonel stood dazed and waiting for death amid the dead bodies of his men—one so young, so handsome, lying there on his back, with a waxen face, staring steadily at the sky through the broken roof....
At Nieuport-les-Bains one dead soldier lay at the end of the esplanade, and a little group of living were huddled under the wall of a red-brick villa, watching other villas falling like card houses in a town that had been built for love and pretty women and the lucky people of the world. British monitors lying close into shore were answering the German bombardment, firing over Nieuport to the dunes by Ostend. From one monitor came a group of figures with white masks of cotton-wool tipped with wet blood. British seamen, and all blind, with the dead body of an officer tied up in a sack....
“O Jesu!... O maman!... O ma pauvre p'tite femme!... O Jesu! O Jesu!”
From thousands of French soldiers lying wounded or parched in the burning sun before the battle of the Marne these cries went up to the blue sky of France in August of '14. They were the cries of youth's agony in war. Afterward I went across the fields where they fought and saw their bodies and their graves, and the proof of the victory that saved France and us. The German dead had been gathered into heaps like autumn leaves. They were soaked in petrol and oily smoke was rising from them....
That was after the retreat from Mons, and the French retreat along all their line, and the thrust that drew very close to Paris, when I saw our little Regular Army, the “Old Contemptibles,” on their way back, with the German hordes following close. Sir John French had his headquarters for the night in Creil. English, Irish, Scottish soldiers, stragglers from units still keeping some kind of order, were coming in, bronzed, dusty, parched with thirst, with light wounds tied round with rags, with blistered feet. French soldiers, bearded, dirty, thirsty as dogs, crowded the station platforms. They, too, had been retreating and retreating. A company of sappers had blown up forty bridges of France. Under a gas-lamp in a foul-smelling urinal I copied out the diary of their officer. Some spiritual faith upheld these men. “Wait,” they said. “In a few days we shall give them a hard knock. They will never get Paris. Jamais de la vie!”...
In Beauvais there was hardly a living soul when three English correspondents went there, after escape from Amiens, now in German hands. A tall cuirassier stood by some bags of gunpowder, ready to blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and broken bottles... In Paris there was a great fear and solitude, except where grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway stations for escape and where French and British soldiers—stragglers all—drank together, and sang above their broken glasses, and cursed the war and the Germans.
And down all the roads from the front, on every day in every month of that first six months of war—as afterward—came back the tide of wounded; wounded everywhere, maimed men at every junction; hospitals crowded with blind and dying and moaning men....
“Had an interesting time?” asked a man I wanted to kill because of his smug ignorance, his damnable indifference, his impregnable stupidity of cheerfulness in this world of agony. I had changed the clothes which were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I had helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons. As an onlooker of war I hated the people who had not seen, because they could not understand. All these things I had seen in the first nine months I put down in a book called The Soul of the War, so that some might know; but it was only a few who understood....