The English base—Stories of the wounded—The cataclysm a reality—London after Mons—The call to Englishmen—The “Fog of war”—From Dieppe to Paris—The red trousers of the French—Empty Paris—Can the German machine be held?—“The French have not had their battle yet!”

Back from Belgium to England; then across the Channel again to Boulogne, where I saw the last of the French garrison march away, their red trousers a throbbing target along the road. From Boulogne the British had advanced into Belgium. Now their base was moved on to Havre. Boulogne, which two weeks before had been cheering the advent of “Tommee Atkeens” singing “Why should we be downhearted?” was ominously lifeless. It was a town without soldiers, a town of brick and mortar and pavements whose very defencelessness was its security should the Germans come.

The only British there were a few stray wounded officers and men who had found their way back from Mons. They had no idea where the British army was. All they realised were sleepless nights, the shock of combat, overpowering artillery fire, and resisting the onslaught of outnumbering masses.

An officer of Lancers, who had ridden through the German cavalry with his squadron, dwelt on the glory of that moment. What did his wound matter? It had come with the burst of a shell in a village street which killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away, reached a railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.

A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when showers of shrapnel descended and the Germans, in that grey-green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battalion made another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him to find any transportation he could; and he, too, was able to get aboard a train. That was all he knew.

These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom of action. They were interesting because they were the first British wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.

Back to London again to catch the mail with an article. One was to “commute” to the war from London as home. It was a base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. One soaked in England at intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever one stepped on the pier at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea complete.

Those days of late August and early September, 1914, were gripping days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea was as yet only a splash of fresh blood. One still wondered if one might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare. Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of detail.

They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining-room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet glances as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home which had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go to the front.

Unconsciously she would play with her wedding-ring. She stole covert glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the throat, when he was not looking at her—which he was most of the time, for reasons which were good and sufficient to others than himself. Apprehended in “wool-gathering,” she mustered a smile which was so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so precious.

They would attempt little flights of talk about everything except the war. He was most solicitous that she should have something which she liked to eat, while she was equally solicitous about him. Wasn’t he going “out there”? And out there he would have to live on army fare. It was all appealing to the old traveller. And then the next morning—she was alone, after she had given him that precious smile in parting. The incident was one of the thousands before the war had become an institution, death a matter of routine, and it was a commonplace for young wives to see young husbands away to the front with a smile.

One such incident does for all, whether the war is young or old. There is nothing else to tell, even when you know wife and husband. I was rather glad that I did not know this pair. Then I should be looking at the casualty list in the newspaper each morning and I might not enjoy my faith that he will return alive. These two seemed to me the best of England. I used to think of them when gossip sought the latest turn of intrigue under the mantle of censorship, when Parliament poured out its oral floods and the newspapers their volumes of words. The man went off to fight; the woman returned to her country home. It was the hour of war, not of talk.

On that Sunday in London when the truth about Mons appeared stark to all England, another young man happened to buy a special edition at a street corner at the same time as myself. By all criteria, the world and his tailor had treated him well and he deserved well of the world. We spoke together about the news. Already the new democracy which the war had developed was in evidence. Everybody had common thoughts and a common thing at stake, with values reckoned in lives, and this makes for equality.

“It’s clear that we have had a bad knock. Why deny it?” he said. Then he added quietly, after a pause: “This is a personal call for me. I’m going to enlist.”

England’s answer to that “bad knock” was out of her experience. She had never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had won the last battle. The next day’s news was worse and the next day’s still worse. The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by forced marches. Paris might fall—no matter! Though the French army were shattered, one heard Englishmen say that the British would create an army to wrest victory from defeat. The spirit of this was fine, but one realised the enormity of the task; should the mighty German machine crush the French machine, the Allies had lost. To say so then was heresy, when the world was inclined to think poorly of the French army and saw Russian numbers as irresistible.

The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be decided. My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the second, farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south, to Dieppe. Where next? To Havre! Events were moving with the speed which had been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown into battle by the quick march of the railroad trains.

Every event was hidden under the “fog of war,” then a current expression—meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their brief lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the lines. The marvel was that any but troop trains should run. All night in that third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris! Tired and preoccupied passengers; every one’s heart heavy; every one’s soul wrenched; every one prepared for the worst! You cared for no other man’s views; the one thing you wanted was no bad news. France had known that when the war came it would be to the death. From the first no Frenchman could have had any illusions. England had not realised yet that her fate was with the soldiers of France, or France that her fate and all the world’s was with the British fleet.

An Italian in our compartment would talk, however, and he would keep the topic down to red trousers, and to the red trousers of a French Territorial opposite with an index finger when his gesticulatory knowledge of the French language, which was excellent, came to the rescue of his verbal knowledge, which was poor. The Frenchman agreed that red trousers were a mistake, but pointed to the blue covering which he had for his cap—which made it all right. The Italian insisted on keeping to the trousers. He talked red trousers till the Frenchman got out at his station and then turned to me to confirm his views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After all, he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to write on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen to this sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men lay dead and wounded from that day’s fight on the soil of France. Red trousers were responsible for the death of a lot of them.

Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvests lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to a hotel with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking busily in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre’s request that every one should go on with his day’s work.

“They’re done!” said an American in the foyer. “The French could not stand up against the Germans—anybody anybody could see that! It’s too bad, but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the next day.”

I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all one’s belief in the French army and in the real character of the French people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of democracy; it meant disaster to all one’s precepts; a personal disaster.

“Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not had their battle yet!” I said.

And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with lots of fight left in it.