s.

* * * * *

Today I had an opportunity to talk with three British officers
recently arrived in Paris from that part of the front just this side
of Chantilly. They were incredibly grimy, dirty, and sweaty and were
greatly embarrassed thereby. They were of the first body of British
troops landed in France; they had met the Germans at Charleroi and had
been through the whole retreat of nearly one hundred and fifty miles,
having been constantly in action for some two weeks. They summed up
their experiences by saying that they had received "a hell of a
licking." This statement is rather over-modest since within a day or
so we have learned that the British, numbering about sixty thousand,
were opposed by four or five German army corps, amounting to two
hundred thousand men, and that in spite of this the British had
retreated stubbornly, contesting every mile.

A most extraordinary thing which these officers told me was that,
during their whole retreat from Charleroi to Compiegne, they had never
seen a single French soldier nor received any assistance from the
French army. One is tempted to wonder what would have happened if
there had been no British army to help check the retreat toward Paris.

British soldiers agree that they have received most extraordinary
hospitality from the civilians and peasantry of Belgium and France.
Whole villages, themselves facing starvation, gave their last crumb of
bread and their last drop of wine to the British troops and cheerfully
slept in the fields in order that the soldiers might snatch a bit of
rest in their houses.

All the officers with whom I have had the opportunity to talk agree
that the German losses have been enormous. I do not think that this is
entirely patriotic exaggeration, since British officers are not
particularly prone to flights of fancy. One of them prefaced his
remarks on the retreat from Charleroi by saying, "The truth of the
matter is, we got damn well licked," and went on to say that his men
shot and shot and shot until they became sick of killing, and that
the Germans kept coming, always coming, their ranks riddled and
smashed by bullets and shells. The British all agree that the German
troops have an unflinching, dogged, brutal courage, which nothing
seems to daunt. They come on and on, climbing over the bodies of the
regiments which have gone before. The German tactics are those of
Napoleon. They attack a position and they