h stained their silk frocks, and rich Americans who had travelled
far to Paris for the sake of safety, who offered great bribes to any
man who would yield his place between wooden boards for a way out
again, and bourgeois families who had shut up shops from the Rue
de la Paix to the Place Pigalle, heedless for once of loss or ruin, but
desperate to get beyond the range of German shells and the horrors
of a beleaguered city.

There were tragic individuals in these crowds. I could only guess at
some of their stories as they were written in lines of pain about the
eyes and mouths of poor old spinsters such as Balzac met hiding
their misery in backstairs flats of Paris tenements--they came blinking
out into the fierce sunlight of the Paris streets like captive creatures
let loose by an earthquake--and of young students who had
eschewed delight and lived laborious days for knowledge and art
which had been overthrown by war's brutality. All classes and types of
life in Paris were mixed up in this retreat, and among them were men
I knew, so that I needed no guesswork for their stories. For weeks
some of them had been working under nervous pressure, keeping "a
stiff upper lip" as it is called to all rumours of impending tragedy. But
the contagion of fear had caught them in a secret way, and suddenly
their nerves had snapped, and they too had abandoned courage and
ideals of duty, slinking, as though afraid of daylight, to stations more
closely sieged than Paris would be. Pitiful wrecks of men, and victims
of this ruthless war in which the non-combatants have suffered even
more sometimes than the fighting men. The neuroticism of the age
was exaggerated by writing men--we have seen the spirit of the old
blood strong and keen--but neurasthenia is not a myth, and God
knows it was found out and made a torture to many men and women
in the city of Paris, when the Great Fear came--closing in with a
narrowing circle until it seemed to clutch at the throats of those
miserable beings.

There were thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who
would not wait for the trains. Along the southern road which goes
down to Tours there were sixty unbroken miles of them. They went in
every kind of vehicle--taxi-cabs for which rich people had paid
fabulous prices, motor-cars which had escaped the military
requisition, farmers' carts laden with several families and piles of
household goods, shop carts drawn by horses already tired to the
point o