nd
Australians in support, went down to the canal-bank, waded across where
the water was shallow, swam across in life-belts where it was deep,
or got across somehow and anyhow, under blasts of machine-gun fire, by
rafts and plank bridges. A few hours after the beginning of the battle
they were far out beyond the German side of the canal, with masses of
prisoners in their hands. The Americans on the left of the attack, where
the canal goes below ground, showed superb and reckless gallantry (they
forgot, however, to "mop up" behind them, so that the enemy came out of
his tunnels and the Australians had to cut their way through), and that
evening I met their escorts with droves of captured Germans. They had
helped to break the last defensive system of the enemy opposite the
British front, and after that our troops fought through open country on
the way to victory.

I saw many of the scenes which led up to Mons and Le Cateau and
afterward to the Rhine. Something of the horror of war passed when the
enemy drew back slowly in retreat from the lands he had invaded, and we
liberated great cities like Lille and Roubaix and Tourcoing, and scores
of towns and villages where the people had been waiting for us so long,
and now wept with joy to see us. The entry into Lille was unforgetable,
when old men and women and girls and boys and little children crowded
round us and kissed our hands. So it was in other places. Yet not all
the horror had passed. In Courtrai, in St.-Amand by Valenciennes, in
Bohain, and other villages, the enemy's shell-fire and poison-gas killed
and injured many of the people who had been under the German yoke so
long and now thought they were safe. Hospitals were filled with women
gasping for breath, with gas-fumes in their lungs, and with dying
children. In Valenciennes the cellars were flooded when I walked there
on its day of capture, so that when shells began to fall the people
could not go down to shelter. Some of them did not try to go down. At an
open window sat an old veteran of 1870 with his medal on his breast, and
with his daughter and granddaughter on each side of his chair. He called
out, "Merci! Merci!" when English soldiers passed, and when I stopped a
moment clasped my hands through the window and could not speak for the
tears which fell down his white and withered cheeks. A few dead Germans
lay about the streets, and in Maubeuge on the day before the armistice
I saw the last dead German of the