country.

I have said that M. Zola is opposed to warfare on principle. His views in
this respect have long been shared by me. Life's keenest impressions are
those acquired in childhood and youth. And in my youth--I was but
seventeen, though already acting as a war correspondent, the youngest, I
suppose, on record--I witnessed war attended by every horror:--A city,
Paris, starved by the foreigner and subsequently in part fired by some of
its own children. And between those disasters, having passed through the
hostile lines, I saw an army of 125,000 men with 350 guns, that of
Chanzy, irretrievably routed after battling in a snowstorm of three days'
duration, cast into highways and byways, with thousands of barefooted
stragglers begging their bread, with hundreds of farmers bewailing their
crops, their cattle, and their ruined homesteads, with mothers
innumerable weeping for their sons, and fair girls in the heyday of their
youth lamenting the lads to whom their troth was plighted. And in that
'Retraite Infernale,' as one of its historians has called it, I saw want,
hunger, cupidity, cruelty, disease, stalking beside the war fiend; so no
wonder that, like Zola, I regard warfare as the greatest of abominations
that fall upon the world. I often regret that, short of actual war itself
and its disaster and misery, there should be no means of bringing the
whole horror of the thing home to those silly, arm-chair, jingo
journalists of many countries, our own included, who, viewing war simply
as a means of imposing the will of the stronger upon the weaker, and
losing sight of all that attends it, save martial pomp and individual
heroism, ever clamour for the exercise of force as soon as any difficulty
arises between two governments.

Ties of affection, bonds of marriage, as well as long years of intimacy,
link me moreover to the French people; and more keenly, perhaps, than
even the master himself, did I realise what war between France and
England might mean; thus we both had an anxious time during the Fashoda
trouble. Fortunately for the general peace hostilities were averted, and
M. Zola was thus able to remain in his secluded English home, and to
continue the writing of his novel.

The weather was still very fine, and now and again he ventured upon a
little excursion. The principal one was to Virginia Water, where he
strolled round the lake, then drove through part of the Great Park, and
thence on to Windsor Castle, where he