A peasant woman passed, pushing a wheelbarrow containing some half-burned household goods and followed by her two small children.
"Look," she said, "at the brutality of these Germans! My husband has gone to war and I am alone with my two little ones. With great difficulty we had managed to gather our crop, and they set fire to our little farm and burned everything."
Half an hour later we were at La Ferté Gaucher, a small town on the Grand Morin, now first made famous by the fact that it was here that the German flight began after the severe fighting last Monday. The invaders had arrived only on Saturday and had the disagreeable surprise of finding that the river bridges had been broken down by the retreating French. The German commandant informed the municipal officials that if the sum of 60,000 francs ($12,000) was not produced he would burn the town. Then he compelled the people to set about rebuilding the bridge, and they worked day and night at this job under the eyes of soldiers with revolvers and rifles ready to shoot down any shirker.
The relief of these people at the return of the Allies may be imagined. Here, as elsewhere, some houses were burned, but otherwise the damage did not appear to be very serious.
The Retreat to Paris
By Philip Gibbs of The London Daily Chronicle.
[Special Dispatch to The New York Times.]
NEAR AMIENS, Aug. 30.—Looking back on all I have seen during the last few days, I find it difficult to piece together the various incidents and impressions and to make one picture. It all seems to me now like a jigsaw puzzle of suffering and fear and courage and death—a litter of odd, disconnected scraps of human agony and of some big, grim scheme which, if one could only get the clue, would give a meaning, I suppose, to all these tears of women and children, to all these hurried movements of soldiers and people, to the death carts trailing back from unknown places, and to the great dark fear that has enveloped all the tract of country in Northwest France through which I have been traveling, driven like one of its victims from place to place. Out of all this welter of individual suffering and from all the fog of mystery which has enshrouded them until now, when the truth may be told, certain big facts with a clear and simple issue will emerge and give one courage.
The French Army and our English troops are now holding good positions in a much stronger and closer line and stemming the tide of the German hordes rolling up to Paris. Gen. Pau, the hero of this war, after his swift return from the eastern front, where he repaired the deadly check at Mülhausen, has dealt a smashing blow at a German Army corps which was striking to the heart of France.
Paris is still safe for the time being, with a great army of allied forces, French, English, and Belgians, drawn across the country as a barrier which surely will not be broken by the enemy. Nothing that has happened gives cause for that despair which has taken hold of people whose fears have exaggerated the facts, frightful enough when taken separately, but not giving any proof that resistance is impossible against the amazing onslaught of the German legions.