hundreds of miles in
France during the last four days along the main strategical lines, grim
sentinels guarding the last barriers to that approaching death which is
sweeping on its way through France to the rich harvest of Paris, which
it was eager to destroy.

There was only one thing to do to escape from the menace of this death.
By all the ways open, by any way, the population of Paris emptied itself
like rushing rivers of humanity along all the lines which promised
anything like safety.

Only those stayed behind to whom life means very little away from Paris
and who if death came desired to die in the city of their life.

Again I write from what I saw and to tell the honest truth from what I
suffered, for the fatigue of this hunting for facts behind the screen of
war is exhausting to all but one's moral strength, and even to that.

I found myself in the midst of a new and extraordinary activity of the
French and English Armies. Regiments were being rushed up to the centre
of the allied forces toward Creil, Montdidier, and Noyon. That was
before last Tuesday, when the English troops [Transcriber: original
'toops'] were fighting hard at Creil.

This great movement continued for several days, putting to a severe test
the French railway system, which is so wonderfully organized that it
achieved this mighty transportation of troops with clockwork regularity.
Working to a time table dictated by some great brain which in
Headquarters Staff of the French Army, calculated with perfect precision
the conditions of a network of lines on which troop trains might be run
to a given point. It was an immense victory of organization, and a
movement which heartened one observer at least to believe that the
German deathblow would again be averted.

I saw regiment after regiment entraining. Men from the Southern
Provinces, speaking the patois of the South; men from the Eastern
Departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war,
at Chalons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre
of France, in garrisons along the Loire. They were all in splendid
spirits and utterly undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance.

"It is nothing, my little one," said a dirty, unshaved gentleman with
the laughing eyes of a D'Artagnan; "we shall bite their heads off. These
brutal bosches are going to put themselves in a guetapens, a veritable
deathtrap. We shall have them at last."

Many of them had fought