An excursion to the front—The magic of a military pass—The high-water mark of German shells—Return of the refugees—Fate of the villages—War’s results—Burying the dead—The victorious spirit of France—Approaching the line—Roll and smoke of the guns—Passing the motor transports—Army organisation—Line reserves—Newspapers and tobacco—Soissons deserted—Stoicism of the townspeople—German prisoners—The Sixth Army headquarters—A town in ruins—Character of French women—French democracy and humanity.

Though the Germans were going, the siege by the cordon of French guards around Paris had not been raised. To them every civilian was a possible spy. So they let no civilians by. Must one remain forever in Paris, screened from any view of the great drama? Was there no way of securing a blue card which would open the road to war for an atom of humanity who wanted to see Frenchmen in action and not to pry into generals’ plans?

Happily, an army winning is more hospitable than an army losing; and bonds of friendship which stretch around the world could be linked with authority which has only to say the word in order that one might have a day’s glimpse of the fields where von Kluck’s Germans were showing their heels to the French.

Ours, I think, was the pioneer of the sightseeing parties which afterward became the accepted form of war correspondence with the French. None could have been under more delightful auspices in companionship or in the event. Victory was in the hearts of our hosts, who included M. Paul Doumer, formerly president of the Chamber of Deputies and governor of French Indo-China and now a senator, and General Fevrier, of the French Medical Service, who was to have had charge of the sanitation of Paris in case of a siege.

M. Doumer was acting as Chef de Cabinet to General Gallieni, the commandant of Paris, and he and General Fevrier and two other officers of Gallieni’s staff, who would have been up to their eyes in work if there had been a siege, wanted to see something of that army whose valour had given them a holiday. Why should not Roberts and myself come along? which is the pleasant way the French have of putting an invitation.

The other member of the party was the veteran European correspondent and representative of the Associated Press in Paris, Elmer Roberts, who would not be doing his duty to Melville E. Stone if he did not arrange for opportunities of this kind. I was really hanging onto Roberts’s coat-tails. Other men may have publicity as individuals in a single newspaper or magazine, but the readers of a thousand newspapers take their news from Paris through him without knowing his name.

Oh, the magic of a military pass and the companionship of an officer in uniform! It separates you from the crowd of millions on the other side of the blank wall of military secrecy and takes you into the area of the millions in uniform; it wins a nod of consent from that middle-aged reservist on a road whose bayonet has the police power of millions of bayonets in support of its authority.

At last one was to see; the measure of his impressions was to be his own eyes and not the written reports. Other passes I have had since, which gave me the run of trenches and shell-fire areas; but this pass opened the first door to the war. That day we ran by Meaux and to ChÂteau Thierry to Soissons and back by Senlis to Paris. We saw a finger’s breadth of battle area; a pin point of army front. Only a ride along a broad, fine road out of Paris, at first; a road which our cars had all to themselves. Then at Claye we came to the high-water mark of the German invasion. This close to Paris in that direction and no closer had the Germans come.

There was the field where the skirmishers had turned back. Farther on, the branches of the avenue of trees which shaded the road had been slashed as if by a whirlwind of knives, where the French soixante-quinze field guns had found a target. Under that sudden bath of projectiles, with the French infantry pressing forward on their front, the German gunners could not wait to take away the cord of five-inch shells which they had piled to blaze their way to Paris. One guessed their haste and their irritation. They were within range of the fortifications; within two hours’ march of the suburbs of the Mecca of forty years of preparation. After all that march from Belgium, with no break in the programme of success, the thunders broke and lightning flashed out of the sky as Manoury’s army rushed upon von Kluck’s flank.

“It was not the way that they wanted us to get the shells,” said a French peasant, who was taking one of the shell baskets for a souvenir. It would make an excellent umbrella stand.

For the French it had been the turn of the tide; for that little British army which had fought its way back from Mons it was the sweet dream, which had kept men up on the retreat, come true. Weary Germans, after a fearful two weeks of effort, became the driven. Weary British and French turned drivers. A hypodermic of victory renewed their energy. Paris was at their back and the German backs in front. They were no longer leaving their dead and wounded behind to the foe; they were sweeping past the dead and wounded of the foe.

But their happiness, that of a winning action, exalted and passionate, had not the depths of that of the refugees who had fled before the German hosts and were returning to their homes in the wake of their victorious army. We passed farmers with children perched on top of carts laden with household goods and drawn by broad-backed farm-horses, with usually another horse or a milch cow tied behind. The real power of France these peasants, holding fast to the acres they own, with the fire of the French nature under their thrifty conservatism. Others on foot were villagers who had lacked horses or carts to transport their belongings. In the packs on their backs were a few precious things which they had borne away and were now bearing back.

Soon they would know what the Germans had done to their homes. What the Germans had done to one piano was evident. It stood in the yard of a house where grass and flowers had been trodden by horses and men. In the sport of victory the piano had been dragged out of the little drawing-room, while Fritz and Hans played and sang in the intoxication of a Paris gained, a France in submission. They did not know what Joffre had in pickle for them. It had all gone according to programme up to that moment. Nothing can stop us Germans! Champagne instead of beer! Set the glass on top of the piano and sing! Haven’t we waited forty years for this day?

Captured diaries of German officers, which reflect the seventh heaven of elation suddenly turned into grim depression, taken in connection with what one saw on the battlefield, reconstruct the scene around that piano. The cup to the lips; then dashed away. How those orders to retreat must have hurt!

The state of the refugees’ homes all depended upon the chances of war. War’s lightning might have hit your roof tree and it might not. It plays no favourites between the honest and the dishonest; the thrifty and the shiftless. We passed villages which exhibited no signs of destruction or of looting. The German troops had marched through in the advance and in the retreat without being billeted. A hurrying army with another on its heels has no time for looting. Other villages had been points of topical importance; they had been in the midst of a fight. General Mauvaise Chance had it in for them. Shells had wrecked some houses; others were burned. Where a German non-commissioned officer came to the door of a French family and said that room must be made for German soldiers in that house and if any one dared to interfere with them he would be shot, there the exhausted human nature of a people trained to think that “Krieg ist Krieg” and that the spoils of war are to the victor had its way.

It takes generations to lift a man up a single degree; but so swift is the effect of war, when men live a day in a year, that he is demonised in a month. Before the occupants had to go, often windows were broken, crockery smashed, closets and drawers rifled. The soldiery which could not have its Paris “took it out” of the property of their hosts. Looting, destruction, one can forgive in the orgy of war which is organised destruction; one can even understand rapine and atrocities when armies, which include latent vile and criminal elements, are aroused to the kind of insane passion which war arouses in human beings. But some indecencies one could not understand in civilised men. All with a military purpose, it is said; for in the nice calculations of a staff system which grinds so very fine, nothing must be excluded that will embarrass the enemy. A certain foully disgusting practice was too common not to have the approval of at least some officers, whose conduct in several chÂteaus includes them as accomplices. Not all officers, not all soldiers. That there should be a few is enough to sicken you of belonging to the human species. Nothing worse in Central America; nothing worse where civilised degeneracy disgraces savagery.

But do not think that destruction for destruction’s sake was done in all houses where German soldiers were billeted. If the good principle was not sufficiently impressed, Belgium must have impressed it; a looting army is a disorderly army. The soldier has burden enough to carry in heavy marching order without souvenirs. That collector of the glass tops of carafes who had thirty on his person when taken prisoner was bound to be a laggard in the retreat.

To their surprise and relief, returning farmers found their big, conical haystacks untouched, though nothing could be more tempting to the wantonness of an army on enemy soil. Strike a match and up goes the harvest! Perhaps the Germans as they advanced had in mind to save the forage for their own horses, and either they were running too fast to stop or the staff overlooked the detail on the retreat.

It was amazing how few signs of battle there were in the open. Occasionally one saw the hastily made shelter trenches of a skirmish line; and again, the emplacements for batteries—hurried field emplacements, so puny beside those of trench warfare. It had been open fighting; the tide of an army sweeping forward and then, pursued, sweeping back. One side was trying to get away; the other to overtake. Here, a rearguard made a determined action which would have had the character of a battle in other days; there, a rearguard was pinched as the French or the British got around it.

Swift marching and quick manoeuvres of the type which gave war some of its old sport and zest; the advance, all the while gathering force, like the deep tide! Crowds of men hurrying across a harvested wheat-field or a pasture after all leave few marks of passage. A day’s rain will wash away the blood stains and liven trampled vegetation. Nature hastens with a kind of contempt of man to repair the damage done by his murderous wrath.

The cyclone past, the people turned out to put things in order. Peasants too old to fight, who had paid the taxes which paid for the rifles and guns and hell-fire, were moving across the fields with spades, burying the bodies of the young men and the horses that were war’s victims. Long trenches full of dead told where the eddy of battle had been fierce and the casualties numerous; scattered mounds of fresh earth where they were light; and sometimes, when the burying was unfinished—well, one draws the curtain over scenes like that in the woods at Betz, where Frenchmen died knowing that Paris was saved and Germans died knowing that they had failed to take Paris.

Whenever we halted our statesman, M. Doumer, was active. Did we have difficulties over a culvert which had been hastily mended, he was out of the car and in command. Always he was meeting some man whom he knew and shaking hands like a senator at home. At one place a private soldier, a man of education by his speech, came running across the street at sight of him.

“Son of an old friend of mine, from my town,” said our statesman. Being a French private meant being any kind of a Frenchman. All inequalities are levelled in the ranks of a great conscript army.

Be it through towns unharmed or towns that had been looted and shelled, the people had the smile of victory, the look of victory in their eyes. Children and old men and women, the stay-at-homes, waved to our car in holiday spirit. The laugh of a sturdy young woman who threw some flowers into the tonneau as we passed, in her tribute to the uniform of the army that had saved France, had the spirit of victorious France—France after forty years’ waiting throwing back a foe that had two soldiers to every one of hers. All the land, rich fields and neat gardens and green stretches of woods in the fair, rolling landscape, basked in victory. Dead the spirit of any one who could not, for the time being, catch the infection of it and feel himself a Frenchman. Far from the Paris of gay show for the tourist one seemed; in the midst of the France of the farms and the villages which had saved Paris and France.

The car sped on over the hard road. Staff officers in other cars whom we passed alone suggested that there was war somewhere ahead. Were we never going to reach the battle-line, the magnet of our speed when a French army chauffeur made all speed laws obsolete!

Shooting out of a grove, a valley made a channel for sound that brought to our ears the thunder of guns, the firing so rapid that it was like the roll of some cyclopean snare-drum beaten with sticks the size of ship-masts. From the crest of the next hill we had a glimpse of an open sweep of parklike country toward wooded hills. As far as we could see against the background of the foliage throwing it into relief was a continuous cloud of smoke from bursting shrapnel shells, renewed with fresh, soft, blue puffs as fast as it was dissipated.

This, then, was a battle. No soldiers, no guns in sight; only a diaphanous, man-made nimbus against masses of autumn green which was raining steel hail. Ten miles of this, one would say; and under it lines of men in blue coats and red trousers and green uniforms hugging the earth, as unseen as a battalion of ants at work in the tall grass. Even if a charge swept across a field one would have been able to detect nothing except moving pin-points on a carpet.

There was hard fighting; a lot of French and Germans were being killed in the direction of CompiÈgne and Noyon to-day. Another dip into another valley and the thir-r-r of a rapid-firer and the muffled firing of a line of infantry were audible. Yes, we were getting up with the army, with one tiny section of it operating along the road we were on. Multiply this by a thousand and you have the whole.

Ahead was the army’s stomach on wheels; a procession of big motor transport trucks keeping their intervals of distance with the precision of a battleship fleet at sea. We should have known that they belonged to the army by the deafness of the drivers to appeals to let us pass. All army transports are like that. What the deuced right has anybody to pass? They are the transport, and only fighting men belong in front of them. Our automobile in trying to go by to one side got stuck in a rut that an American car, built for bad roads, would have made nothing of; which proves again how clearly European armies are tied to their fine roads. We got out, and here was our statesman putting his shoulder to the wheel again. That is the way of the French in war. Everybody tries to help. By this time the transport chauffeurs also remembered that they were Frenchmen; and as Frenchmen are polite even in time of war, they let us by.

A motor-cyclist approached with his hand up.

“Stop here!” he called.

Those transport chauffeurs who were deaf to ex-premiers heard instantly and obeyed. In front of them was a line of single horse-drawn carts, with an extra horse in the rear. They could take paths that the motor-trucks could not. Archaic they seemed, yet friendly, as a relic of how armies were fed in other days. For the first time I was realising what the automobile means to war. It brings the army impedimenta close up to the army’s rear; it means a reduction of road space occupied by transport by three-quarters; ease in keeping pace with food with the advance, speed in falling back in case of retreat.

All that day I did not see a single piece of French army transport broken down. And this army had been fighting for weeks; it had been an army on the road. The valuable part of our experience was exactly in this: a glimpse of an army in action after it had been through all the vicissitudes that an army may have in marching and counter-marching and attack. Order one was to expect afterwards behind the siege line of trenches when there had been time to establish a routine; organisation and smooth organisation you had here at the climax of a month’s strain. It told the story of the character of the French army and the reasons for its success other than its courage. The brains were not all with the German Staff.

That winding road, with a new picture at every turn, now revealed the town of Soissons in the valley of the River Aisne. Soissons was ours, we knew, since yesterday. How much farther had we gone? Was our advance still continuing? For then, the winter trench-fighting was unforeseen and the sightseers thought of the French army as following up success with success. Paris, rising from gloom to optimism, hoped to see the Germans put out of France. The appetite for victory grew after a week’s bulletins which moved the flags forward on the map every day.

Another turn and Soissons was hidden from view by a woodland. Here we came upon what looked like a leisurely family party of reserves. The French army, a small section of French army along a road! And thus, if one would see the whole it must be in bits along the roads when not on the firing-line. They were sprawling in the fields in the genial afternoon sun, looking as if they had no concern except to rest. Uniforms dusty and faces tanned and bearded told their story of the last month.

The duty of a portion of a force is always to wait on what is being done by the others at the front. These were waiting near a forks which could take them to the right or the left, as the situation demanded. At their rear, their supply of small arms ammunition; in front, caissons of shells for a battery speaking from the woods near by; a troop of cavalry drawn up, the men dismounted, ready; and ahead of them more reserves ready; everything ready.

This was where the general wanted the body of men and equipment to be, and here they were. There were no dragging ends in the rear, so far as I could see; nobody complaining that food or ammunition was not up; no aide looking for somebody who could not be found; no excited staff officer rushing about shouting for somebody to look sharp for somebody had made a mistake. The thing was unwarlike; it was like a particularly well-thought-out route march. Yet at the word that company of cavalry might be in the thick of it, at the point where they were wanted; the infantry rushing to the support of the firing-line; the motor transport facing around for withdrawal, if need be. It was only a little way, indeed, into the zone of death from the rear of that compact column.

Thousands of such compact bodies on as many roads, each seemingly a force by itself and each a part of the whole, which could be a dependable whole only when every part was ready, alert, and up where it belonged! Nothing can be left to chance in a battle-line three hundred miles long. The general must know what to depend on, mile by mile, in his plans. Millions of human units are grouped in increasingly larger units, harmonised according to set forms. The most complex of all machines is that of a vast army, which yet must be kept most simple. No unit acts without regard to the others; every one must know how to do his part. The parts of the machine are standardised. One is like the other in training, uniform, and every detail, so that one can replace another. Oldest of all trades this of war; old experts the French. What one saw was like manoeuvres. It must be like manoeuvres or the army would not hold together. Manoeuvres are to teach armies coherence; war tries out that coherence, which you may not have if some one does not know just what to do; if he is uncertain in his rÔle. Haste leads to confusion; haste is only for supreme moments. In order to know how to hasten when the hurry call comes, the mighty organism must move in its routine with the smoothness of a well-rehearsed play.

Joffre and the others who directed the machine must know more than the mechanics of staff-control. They must know the character of the man-material in the machine. It was their duty as real Frenchmen to understand Frenchmen, their verve, their restlessness for the offensive, their individualism, their democratic intelligence, the value of their elation, the drawback of their tendency to depression and to think for themselves. Indeed, the leader must counteract the faults of his people and make the most of their virtues.

Thus, we had a French army’s historical part reversed: a French army falling back and concentrating on the Marne to receive the enemy blow. Equally alive to German racial traits, the German Staff had organised in their mass offensive the Élan which means fast marching and hard blows. Thus, we found the supposedly excitable French digging in to receive the onslaught of the supposedly phlegmatic German. When the time came for the charge—ah, you can always depend on a Frenchman to charge!

Those reserves were pawns on a chessboard. They appeared like it; one thought that they realised it. Their individual intelligence and democracy had reasoned out the value of obedience and homogeneity, rather than accepted the dictum of any war lord. Difficult to think that each had left a vacancy at a family board; difficult to think that they were not automatons in a process of endless routine of war; but not difficult to learn that they were Frenchmen once we had thrown our bombs in the midst of the group.

Of old, one knew the wants of soldiers. One needed no hint of what was welcome at the front. Never at any front were there enough newspapers or tobacco. Men smoke twice as much as usual in the strain of waiting for action, men who do not use tobacco at all get the habit. Ask the G.A.R. men who fought in our great war if this is not true. Then, too, when your country is at war, when back at home hands stretch for every fresh edition and you at the front know only what happens in your alley, think what a newspaper from Paris means out on the battle-line seventy miles from Paris. So I brought a bundle of newspapers.

Monsieur, the sensation is beyond even the French language to express—the sensation of sitting down by the roadside with this morning’s edition and the first cigarette for twenty-four hours.

“C’est Épatant! C’est chic, Ça! C’est magnifique! Alors, nom de Dieu! Tiens! HÉlas! VoilÀ! Merci, mille remerciements!”—it was an army of Frenchmen with ready words, quick, telling gestures, pouring out their volume of thanks as the car sped by, and we tossed out our newspapers at intervals, so that all should have a look.

An Écho de Paris that fell into the road was the centre of a flag-rush, which included an officer. Most unmilitary—an officer scrambling at the same time as his men! In the name of the Kaiser, what discipline!

Then the car stopped long enough for me to see a private give the paper to his officer, who was plainly sensible of a loss of dignity, with the courtesy which said, “A thousand pardons, mon capitaine!” and the capitaine began reading the newspaper aloud to his men. Scores of human touches which were French, republican, democratic!

With half our cigarettes gone, we fell in with some brown-skinned, native African troops, the Mohammedan Turcos. Their white teeth gleaming, their black eyes devilishly eager, they began climbing onto the car. We gave them all the cigarettes in sight; but fortunately our reserve supply was not visible, and an officer’s sharp command saved us from being invested by storm.

As we came into Soissons we left the reserves behind. They were kept back out of range of the German shells, making the town a dead space between them and the firing-line which was beyond. When the Germans retreated through the streets the French had taken care, as it was their town, to keep their fire away from the cathedral and the main square to the outskirts and along the river. Not so the German guns when the French infantry passed through. Soissons was not a German town.

We alighted from the car in a deserted street, with all the shutters of shops that had not been torn down by shell-fire closed. Soissons was as silent as the grave, within easy range of many enemy guns. War seemed only for the time being in this valley bottom shut in from the roar of artillery a few miles away, except for a French battery which was firing methodically and slowly, its shells whizzing toward the ridge back of the town.

The next thing that one wanted most was to go into that battery and see the soixante-quinze and their skilful gunners. Our statesman said that he would try to locate it. We thought that it was in the direction of the river, that famous Aisne which has since given its name to the longest siege-line in history; a small, winding stream in the bottom of an irregular valley. Both bridges across it had been cut by the Germans. If that battery were on the opposite side under cover of any one of a score of blots of foliage we could not reach it. Another shot—and we were not sure that the battery was not on the other side of the town; a crack out of the landscape: this was modern artillery fire to one who faced it. Apparently the guns of the battery were scattered, according to the accepted practice, and from the central firing-station word to fire was being passed first to one gun and then to another.

Beside the buttress of one bridge lay two still figures of Algerian Zouaves. These were fresh dead, fallen in the taking of the town. Only two men! There were dead by thousands which one might see in other places. These two had leaped out from cover to dash forward and bullets were waiting for them. They had rolled over on their backs, their rigid hands still in the position of grasping their rifles after the manner of crouching skirmishers. Our statesman said that we had better give up trying to locate the battery; and one of the officers called a halt to trying to go up to the firing-line on the part of a personally conducted party, after we stopped a private hurrying back from the front on some errand. With his alertness, the easy swing of his walk, his light step, and that freedom in spirit and appearance, he typified the thing which the French call Élan. Whenever one asked a question of a French private you could depend upon a direct answer. He knew or he did not know. This definiteness, the result of military training, as well as the Gallic lucidity of thought, is not the least of the human factors in making an efficient army, where every man and every unit must definitely know his part. This young man, you realised, had tasted the “salt of life,” as Lord Kitchener calls it. He had heard the close sing of bullets; he had known the intoxication of a charge.

“Does everything go well?” M. Doumer asked.

“It is not going at all, now. It is sticking,” was the answer. “Some Germans were busy up there in the stone quarries while the others were falling back. They have a covered trench and rapid-fire gun positions to sweep a zone of fire which they have cleared.”

Famous stone quarries of Soissons, providing ready-made dugouts as shelter from shells!

There is a story of how before Marengo Napoleon heard a private saying: “Now this is what the general ought to do!” It was Napoleon’s own plan revealed. “You keep still!” he said. “This army has too many generals.”

“They mean to make a stand,” the private went on. “It’s an ideal place for it. There is no use of an attack in front. We’d be mowed down by machine guns.” The br-r-r of a dozen shots from a German machine gun gave point to his conclusion. “Our infantry is hugging what we have and entrenching. You better not go up. One has to know the way, or he’ll walk right into a sharpshooter’s bullet”—instructions that would have been applicable a year later when you were about to visit a British trench in almost the same location.

The siege warfare of the Aisne line had already begun. It was singular to get the first news of it from a private in Soissons and then to return to Paris and London, on the other side of the curtain of secrecy, where the public thought that the Allied advance would continue.

“Allons!” said our statesman, and we went to the town square, where German guns had carpeted the ground with branches of shade trees and torn off the fronts of houses, revealing sections of looted interior which had been further messed by shell-bursts. Some women and children and a crippled man came out-of-doors at sight of us. M. Doumer introduced himself and shook hands all around. They were glad to meet him in much the same way as if he had been on an election campaign.

“A German shell struck there across the square only half an hour ago,” said one of the women.

“What do you do when there is shelling?” asked M. Doumer.

“If it is bad we go into the cellar,” was the answer; an answer which implied that peculiar fearlessness of women, who get accustomed to fire easier than men. These were the fatalists of the town, who would not turn refugee; helpless to fight, but grimly staying with their homes and accepting what came with an incomprehensible stoicism, which possibly had its origin in a race-feeling so proud and bitter that they would not admit that they could be afraid of anything German, even a shell.

“And how did the Germans act?”

“They made themselves at home in our houses and slept in our beds, while we slept in the kitchen,” she answered. “They said if we kept indoors and gave them what they wanted we should not be harmed. But if any one fired a shot at their troops or any arms were found in our houses, they would burn the town. When they were going back in a great hurry—how they scattered from our shells! We went out in the square to see our shells, monsieur!”

What mattered the ruins of her home? Our shells had returned vengeance.

Arrows with directions in German, “This way to the river,” “This way to Villers-Cotteret,” were chalked on the standing walls; and on door-casings the names of the detachments of the Prussian Guard billeted there, all in systematic Teutonic fashion.

“Prince Albrecht Joachim, one of the Kaiser’s sons, was here and I talked with him,” said the Mayor, who thought we should enjoy a morsel from court circles in exchange for a copy of the Écho de Paris which contained the news that Prince Albrecht had been wounded later. The mayor looked tired, this local man of the people, who had to play the shepherd of a stricken flock. Afterwards, they said that he deserted his charge and a lady, Mme. Macherez, took his place. All I know is that he was present that day; or at least a man who was introduced to me as mayor; and he was French enough to make a bon mot by saying that he feared there was some fault in his hospitality because he had been unable to keep his guest.

“May I have this confiture?” asked a battle-stained French orderly, coming up to him. “I found it in that ruined house there—all the Germans had left. I haven’t had a confiture for a long time and, monsieur, you cannot imagine what a hunger I have for confitures.”

All the while the French battery kept on firing slowly, then again rapidly, their cracks trilling off like the drum of knuckles on a table-top. Another effort to locate one of the guns before we started back to Paris failed. Speeding on, we had again a glimpse of the landscape toward Noyon, sprinkled with shell-bursts. The reserves were around their campfires making savoury stews for the evening meal. They would sleep where night found them on the sward under the stars, as in wars of old. That scene remains indelible as one of many while the army was yet mobile, before the contest became one of the mole and of the beaver.

Though one had already seen many German prisoners in groups and convoys, the sight of two on the road fixed the attention because of the surroundings and the contrast suggested between French and German natures. Both were young, in the very prime of life, and both Prussian. One was dark-complexioned, with a scrubbly beard which was the product of the war. He marched with such rigidity that I should not have been surprised to see him break into a goose-step. The other was of that mild, blue-eyed, tow-haired type from the Baltic provinces, with the thin white skin which does not tan but burns. He was frailer than the other and he was tired; oh, how tired! He would lag and then stiffen back his shoulders and draw in his chin and force a trifle more energy into his step.

A typical, lively French soldier was escorting the pair. He looked pretty tired, too, but he was getting over the ground in the natural, easy way in which man is meant to walk. The aboriginal races, who have a genius for long distances on foot, do not march in the German fashion, which looks impressive, but lacks endurance. By the same logic, the cayuse’s gait is better for thirty miles day in and day out than the high-stepping carriage horse’s.

You could realise the contempt which those two martial Germans had for their captor. Four or five peasant women refugees by the roadside unloosened their tongues in piercing feminine satire and upbraiding.

“You are going to Paris, after all! This is what you get for invading our country; and you’ll get more of it!”

The little French soldier held up his hand to the women and shook his head. He was a chivalrous fellow, with imagination enough to appreciate the feelings of an enemy who has fought hard and lost. Such as he would fight fair and hold this war of the civilisations up to something like the standards of civilisation.

The very tired German stiffened up again, as his drill sergeant had taught him, and both stared straight ahead, proud and contemptuous, as their Kaiser would wish them to do. I should recognise the faces of these two Germans and of that little French guard if I saw them ten years hence. In ten years, what will be the Germans’ attitude toward this war and their military lords?

It is not often that one has a senator for a guide; and I never knew a more efficient one than our statesman. His own curiosity was the best possible aid in satisfying our own. Having seen the compactness and simplicity of an army column at the front, we were to find that the same thing applied to high command. A sentry and a small flag at the doorway of a village hotel: this was the headquarters of the Sixth Army, which General Manoury had formed in haste and flung at von Kluck with a spirit which crowned his white hairs with the audacity of youth. He was absent, but we might see something of the central direction of one hundred and fifty thousand men in the course of one of the most brilliant manoeuvres of the war, before staffs had settled down to office existence in permanent quarters. That is, we might see the little there was to see: a soldier telegrapher in one bedroom, a soldier typewritist in another, officers at work in others. One realised that they could pack up everything and move in the time it takes to toss enough clothes into a bag to spend a night away from home. Apparently, when the French fought they left red tape behind with the bureaucracy.

From his seat before a series of maps on a sitting-room table an officer of about thirty-five rose to receive us. It struck me that he exemplified self-possessed intelligence and definite knowledge; that he had coolness and steadiness plus that acuteness of perception and clarity of statement which are the gift of the French. You felt sure that no orders which left his hand wasted any words or lacked explicitness. The Staff is the brains of the army, and he had brains.

“All goes well!” he said, as if there were no more to say. All goes well! He would say it when things looked black or when they looked bright, and in a way that would make others believe it.

Outside the hotel were no cavalry escorts or commanders, no hurrying orderlies, none of the legendary physical activity that is associated with an army headquarters. An automobile drove up, an officer got out; another officer descended the stairs to enter a waiting car. The wires carry word faster than the cars. Each subordinate commander was in his place along that line where we had seen the puffs of smoke against the landscape, ready to answer a question or obey an order. That simplicity, like art itself, which seems so easy is the most difficult accomplishment of all in war.

After dark, in a drizzling rain, we came to what seemed to be a town, for our automobile lamps spread their radiant streams over wet pavements. But these were the only lights. Tongues of loose brick had been shot across the cobblestones and dimly the jagged skyline of broken walls of buildings on either side could be discovered. It was Senlis, the first town I had seen which could be classified as a town in ruins. Afterwards, one became a sort of specialist in ruins, comparing the latest with previous examples of destruction.

Approaching footsteps broke the silence. A small, very small, French soldier—he was not more than five feet two—appeared and we followed him to an ambulance that had broken down for want of gasoline. It belonged to the SociÉtÉ de Femmes de France. The little soldier had put on a uniform as a volunteer for the only service his stature would permit. In those days many volunteer organisations were busy seeking to “help.” There was a kind of competition among them for wounded. This ambulance had got one and was taking him to Paris, off the regular route of the wounded who were being sent south. The boot-soles of a prostrate figure showed out of the dark recess of the interior. This French officer, a major, had been hit in the shoulder. He tried to control the catch in his voice which belied his assertion that he was suffering little pain. The drizzling rain was chilly. It was a long way to Paris yet.

“We will make inquiries,” said our kindly general.

A man who came out of the gloom said that there was a hospital kept by some Sisters of Charity in Senlis which had escaped destruction. The question was put into the recesses of the ambulance:

“Would you prefer to spend the night here and go on in the morning?”

“Yes, monsieur, I—should—like—that—better!” The tone left no doubt of the relief that the journey in a car with poor springs was not to be continued after hours of waiting, marooned in the street of a ruined town.

While the ambulance passed inside the hospital gate, I spoke with an elderly woman who came to a nearby door. Cool and definite she was as a French soldier, bringing home the character of the women of France which this war has made so well-known to the world.

“Were you here during the fighting?”

“Yes, monsieur, and during the shelling and the burning. The shelling was not enough. The Germans said that some one fired on their soldiers—a boy, I believe—so they set fire to the houses. One could only look and hate and pray as their soldiers passed through, looking so unconquerable, making all seem so terrible for France. Was it to be ’70 over again? One’s heart was of stone, monsieur. Tiens! They came back faster than they went. A mitrailleuse was down there at the end of the street, our mitrailleuse! The bullets went cracking by. They crack, the bullets; they do not whistle like the stories say. Then the street was empty of Germans who could run. The dead they could not run, nor the wounded. Then the French came up the street, running, too—running after the Germans. It was good, monsieur, good, good! My heart was not of stone then, monsieur. It could not beat fast enough for happiness. It was the heart of a girl. I remember it all very clearly. I always shall, monsieur.”

“Allons!” said our statesman. “The officer is well cared for.”

The world seemed normal again as we passed through other towns unharmed and swept by the dark countryside, till a red light rose in our path and a sharp “Qui vive?” came out of the night as we slowed down. This was not the only sentry call from a French Territorial in front of a barricade.

At a second halt we found a chain as well as a barricade across the road. For a moment it seemed that even the suave parliamentarism of our statesman or the authority of our general and our passes could not convince one grizzled reservist, doing his duty for France at the rear while the young men were at the front, that we had any right to be going into Paris at that hour of the night. The password, which was “Paris,” helped, and we felt it a most appropriate password as we came to the broad streets of the city that was safe.

There is a popular idea that Napoleon was a super-genius who won all his battles alone. It is wrong. He had a lot of Frenchmen along to help. Much the same kind of Frenchmen live to-day. Not until they fought again would the world believe this. It seems that the excitable Gaul, whom some people thought would become demoralised in face of German organisation, merely talks with his hands. In a great crisis he is cool, as he always was. I like the French for their democracy and humanity. I like them, too, for leaving their war to France and Marianne; for not dragging in God as do the Germans. For it is just possible that God is not in the fight. We don’t know that He even approved of the war.