Now It Can Be Told | Page 5

bedraggled skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her husband was
in the battle that was now being fought round their own town. She was
brave-- pointed out the line of the German advance on the map--and it
was in a troop-train crowded with French soldiers--and then burst into

wild weeping, clasping the hand of an English writing-man so that her
nails dug into his flesh. I remember her still.
"Courage, maman! Courage, p'tite maman!" said the boy of eight.
Through Amiens at night had come a French army in retreat. There
were dead and wounded on their wagons. Cuirassiers stumbled as they
led their tired horses. Crowds of people with white faces, like ghosts in
the darkness, stared at their men retreating like this through their city,
and knew that the enemy was close behind.
"Nous sommes perdus!" whispered a woman, and gave a wailing cry.
People were fighting their way into railway trucks at every station for
hundreds of miles across northern France. Women were beseeching a
place for the sake of their babes. There was no food for them on
journeys of nineteen hours or more; they fainted with heat and hunger.
An old woman died, and her corpse blocked up the lavatory. At night
they slept on the pavements in cities invaded by fugitives.
At Furnes in Belgium, and at Dunkirk on the coast of France, there
were columns of ambulances bringing in an endless tide of wounded.
They were laid out stretcher by stretcher in station-yards, five hundred
at a time. Some of their faces were masks of clotted blood. Some of
their bodies were horribly torn. They breathed with a hard snuffle. A
foul smell came from them.
At Chartres they were swilling over the station hall with disinfecting
fluid after getting through with one day's wounded. The French doctor
in charge had received a telegram from the director of medical services:
"Make ready for forty thousand wounded." It was during the first battle
of the Marne.
"It is impossible!" said the French doctor. . . .
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