or
lay down in sheer exhaustion, cursing the Germans and not caring if
they came, straggled back later--weeks later--by devious routes to
Rouen or Paris, after a wandering life in French villages, where the
peasants fed them and nursed them so that they were in no hurry to
leave. It was the time when the temptation to desert seized men with
a devilish attraction. They had escaped from such hells at Charleroi
and Cambrai and Le Cateau. Boys who had never heard the roar of
guns before except in mimic warfare had crouched and cowered
beneath a tempest of shells, waiting, terrified, for death. Death had
not touched them. By some miracle they had dodged it, with dead
men horribly mutilated on either side of them, so that blood had
slopped about their feet and they had jerked back from shapeless
masses of flesh--of men or horses--sick with the stench of it, cold
with the horror of it. Was it any wonder that some of these young men
who had laughed on the way to Waterloo Station, and held their
heads high in the admiring gaze of London crowds, sure of their own
heroism, slunk now in the backyards of French farmhouses, hid
behind hedges when men in khaki passed, and told wild, incoherent
tales, when cornered at last by some cold-eyed officer in some town
of France to which they had blundered? It was the coward's chance,
and I for one can hardly bring myself to blame the poor devil I met
one day in Rouen, stuttering out lies, to save his skin, or the two
gunners, disguised in civil clothes, who begged from me near
Amiens, or any of the half-starved stragglers who had "lost" their
regiments and did not go to find them. Some of them were shot and
deserved their fate, according to the rules of war and the stern justice
of men who know no fear. But in this war there are not many men
who have not known moments of cold terror, when all their pride of
manhood oozed away and left them cowards, sick with horror at all
the frightfulness. Out of such knowledge pity comes.

It was pity and a sense of impending tragedy which took hold of me in
Creil and on the way to Paris when I was confronted with the
confusion of the British retreat, and, what seemed its inevitable
consequences, the siege and fall of the French capital.

11

I reached Paris in the middle of the night on September 2 and saw
extraordinary scenes. It had become known during the day that
German outposts had reached Senlis and Chantilly, and that Paris
was no longer t