aiting, deliberately, though she had waited for five hours in
the street outside.

8

The railway time-tables ceased to have a meaning after the first hour
of mobilization. Bradshaw became a lie and civil passengers were
only allowed on the rare trains which ran without notice at any hour of
the day or night, at the discretion of military officers, according to the
temporary freedom of the line from troop trains and supply trains.
Those tourist crowds suffered intolerable things, which I shared with
them, though I was a different kind of traveller. I remember one such
scene at Dijon, typical of many others. Because only one train was
starting on that day to the capital, and the time of it was utterly
unknown to the railway officials, three or four hundred people had to
wait hour after hour, for half a night, penned up in a waiting-room,
which became foul with the breath and heat of so many people. In
vain did they appeal to be let out on to the platform where there would
be more air and space. A sentry with fixed bayonet stood with his
back to them and barred the way. Old ladies sat down in despair on
their baggage, wedged between legs straddled across their bags. A
delicate woman near me swooned in the stifling atmosphere. I had
watched her grow whiter and whiter and heard the faintness of her
sighs, so that when she swayed I grasped her by the arm and held
her up until her husband relieved me of her weight. A Frenchwoman
had a baby at her breast. It cried with an unceasing wail. Other
babies were crying; and young girls, with sensitive nerves, were
exasperated by this wailing misery and the sickening smell which
pervaded this closed room.

When the train came in, the door was opened and there was a wild
rush for the carriages, without the English watchword of "women and
children first." Thrust on one side by sharp elbows, I and my two
friends struggled at last into the corridor, and for nineteen hours sat
there on the sharp edges of our upturned trunks, fixed rigidly between
the bodies of other travellers. To the left of us was a French peasant,
a big, quiet man, with a bovine gift of patience and utterly taciturn.
After the first five minutes I suspected that somewhere concealed
about his person was a ripe cheese. There was a real terror in the
malodorous vapours which exhaled from him. In a stealthy way they
crept down the length of the corridor, so that other people, far away,
flung open windows and thrust