Paths of Glory | Page 5

Millet. Their spades were speared upright into the mound of fresh earth.
Behind them a stenciling of poplars rose against the sky line.
We saw the bodies lifted out of the wagon. We saw them slide into the

shallow grave, and saw the two diggers start at their task of filling in
the hole.
Not until then did it occur to any one of us that we had not spoken to
the men in charge of the wagon, or they to us. There was one detached
house, not badly battered, alongside the road at the lower edge of the
field where the burial took place. It had a shield on its front wall
bearing the Belgian arms and words to denote that it was a customs
house.
A glance at our map showed us that at this point the French boundary
came up in a V-shaped point almost to the road. Had the gravediggers
picked a spot fifty yards farther on for digging their trench, those two
dead Frenchmen would have rested in the soil of their own country.
The sun was almost down by now, and its slanting rays slid lengthwise
through the elm-tree aisles along our route. Just as it disappeared we
met a string of refugees--men, women and children--all afoot, all
bearing pitiably small bundles. They limped along silently in a
straggling procession. None of them was weeping; none of them
apparently had been weeping. During the past ten days I had seen
thousands of such refugees, and I had yet to hear one of them cry out or
complain or protest.
These who passed us now were like that. Their heavy peasant faces
expressed dumb bewilderment--nothing else. They went on up the road
into the gathering dusk as we went down, and almost at once the sound
of their clunking tread died out behind us. Without knowing certainly,
we nevertheless imagined they were the dwellers of Montignies St.
Christophe going back to the sorry shells that had been their homes.
An hour later we passed through the back lines of the German camp
and entered the town of Beaumont, to find that the General Staff of a
German army corps was quartered there for the night, and that the main
force of the column, after sharp fighting, had already advanced well
beyond the frontier. France was invaded.

Chapter 2
To War in a Taxicab
In a taxicab we went to look for this war. There were four of us, not
counting the chauffeur, who did not count. It was a regular taxicab,
with a meter on it, and a little red metal flag which might be turned up
or turned down, depending on whether the cab was engaged or at
liberty; and he was a regular chauffeur.
We, the passengers, wore straw hats and light suits, and carried no
baggage. No one would ever have taken us for war correspondents out
looking for war. So we went; and, just when we were least expecting it,
we found that war. Perhaps it would be more exact to say it found us.
We were four days getting back to Brussels, still wearing our straw hats,
but without any taxicab. The fate of that taxicab is going to be one of
the unsolved mysteries of the German invasion of Belgium.
From the hour when the steamer St. Paul left New York, carrying
probably the most mixed assortment of passengers that traveled on a
single ship since Noah sailed the Ark, we on board expected hourly to
sight something that would make us spectators of actual hostilities. The
papers that morning were full of rumors of an engagement between
English ships and German ships somewhere off the New England
coast.
Daily we searched the empty seas until our eyes hurt us; but, except
that we had one ship's concert and one brisk gale, and that just before
dusk on the fifth day out, the weather being then gray and misty, we
saw wallowing along, hull down on the starboard bow, an English
cruiser with two funnels, nothing happened at all. Even when we
landed at Liverpool nothing happened to suggest that we had reached a
country actively engaged in war, unless you would list the presence of a
few khaki-clad soldiers on the landing stage and the painful absence of
porters to handle our baggage as evidences of the same. I remember
seeing Her Grace the Duchess of Marlborough sitting hour after hour
on a baggage truck, waiting for her heavy luggage to come off the tardy

tender and up the languid chute into the big dusty dockhouse.
I remember, also, seeing women, with their hats flopping down in their
faces and their hair all streaming, dragging huge trunks across the floor;
and if all of us had not been in the same