Days ... nights ... they seemed to have passed out of any world they had ever known, into a sinister, topsy-turvy world, where murder and destruction ruled.

Griffith down on the Salisbury plain, where there were great camps, was already making portions of the picture. Returning, at last, to London he escorted his little party down to Southampton, to take boat for France. It was a transport, crowded with soldiers. Mrs. Gish and the girls were in one tiny room, two in one bunk. Twice they started, and were sent back because of floating mines. Finally they were at Havre, and next evening at Paris, at the Grand Hotel.

Paris was dark—a place where almost anything could happen—but Griffith and the girls somehow managed to grope their way about, to the river and elsewhere. By daylight they did some shopping.

Griffith got the papers that would permit them to go to the fighting area; then, one morning, with Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, and Bobby Harron, set out in an automobile, passed through the gates of Paris. In an article for a home paper, Lillian described their journey:

Paris still has gates, just as you read about in the romantic novels. There is a particular gate that leads to the war zone and not a single, solitary human being can go through it unless he is a soldier, or one who has business in the zone.

Can you imagine how important you feel when you go through that gate? You find it very hard to believe that you are not just acting in a “movie,” in a Los Angeles background that Mr. Huck, the man who builds the moving-picture sets, has built—the road and everything.

And how you do go! By tall poplar trees, by long fields of France. France! Why, the very name is a poem and a romantic novel, all by itself. Lombardy poplars! It sounds like an old-fashioned song.

Through the fields are the long lines of barbed wire. That is where the trenches are. The very trenches that used to defend Paris. Then, after fifteen minutes’ ride, you are where the French stood in defense of Paris.... This is where the Germans were. They came this far. This very road ... these very trenches are where the men were.

But now you see the first town that the Germans bombed. You come to the same kind of houses, blown all to pieces, wreck and ruin everywhere. In one second-story, there was part of a bedstead still left, and pieces of bed-clothes, that no one had taken the trouble to pick up, after the French had come back. I can write about it, and I can talk about it, and you can read about it, until you are old and gray and sit in a rocking-chair, but you could not understand it unless you saw it. Just streets, muddy and deserted, and little graveyards of houses, hundreds of them.

You may not know it, but if you have been in one raid, or one bombardment, where you hear the explosions coming closer and closer, and you shake and shake and tremble and get sick at your stomach, and dizzy, and lose your mind with fear, every moment, you can imagine what it was to these people who had to endure it for hours and days, and finally had their whole places blown away.

Were they running down the road we have been on, when this happened? Sometimes they would not leave, because they did not know where else to go. They could not believe it was true, anyhow, and they stayed and stayed on.

The farther they went, the greater the desolation. They worked in CompiÈgne and Senlis, and anyone who visited that neighborhood, even as late as 1921, can form a dim idea of what it must have been in 1917. Ruin everywhere, broken homes; furniture in fragments, and scattered. Pieces of everything; clothing, little playthings, bits of lace, scraps of another existence.

To the eastward, the guns were always going. All that part of France was still subject to bombing raids. There were days when it was necessary to take refuge with a little French family, in a bomb cellar. Lillian wrote:

I have been in cellars myself, with a lot of other people around, frightened to death, sitting close to Mama and Dorothy, who had the shakes and whimpered as she used to when she was a baby, because it was so terrible.

They learned a number of things: they learned to tell enemy planes, to know shrapnel by its gray drift of smoke. They did not remain long in that sector—only long enough to get the required pictures. Griffith went to the front line, and made trench scenes—in the line itself. Then directly they were all back in London, in the raids again. Apparently they had not stopped ... they would never stop.

One night when the planes had been over three times, the noise was so terrific that Dorothy suggested they go down into one of the ballrooms. They found English officers and ladies strolling about, calm in their English way, apparently not greatly concerned by the raid which was still going on. Dorothy, nervously watching, saw a lovely girl about her own age, come in. They looked at each other, at first without speaking. Then the girl said:

“You are an American, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So am I,” and they fell into each other’s arms.

They spoke of the horrors of the raids—of the one then going on. Finally, Dorothy said:

“One thing I’m thankful for, I’m soon going back home, and will get away from all this.”

The girl’s eyes grew big. She said:

“You are going back! And you are not afraid?”

“Afraid? After all this? At least, if one is hit by a torpedo, it’s direct, and sure, and soon ended. In a raid like this, you never know.”

But the girl said:

“I can never imagine crossing the water again.”

“Why?”

“I was on the Lusitania, coming to England with a chaperon, to meet my fiancÉ. I clung to a deck-chair for four hours. My chaperon was drowned right beside me.”

Dorothy, telling of it afterwards, said:

“I did not know her name—I do not know it now. She never knew mine. She had a look in her eyes she will carry the rest of her days.”