to
military depots where they would change their clothes and all their
way of life--these pictures of preparation for war flashed through the
carriage windows into my brain, mile after mile, through the country of
France, until sometimes I closed my eyes to shut out the glare and
glitter of this kaleidoscope, the blood-red colour of all those French
trousers tramping through the dust, the lurid blue of all those soldiers'
overcoats, the sparkle of all those gun-wheels. What does it all mean,
this surging tide of armed men? What would it mean in a day or two,
when another tide of men had swept up against it, with a roar of
conflict, striving to overwhelm this France and to swamp over its
barriers in waves of blood? How senseless it seemed that those mild-
eyed fellows outside my carriage windows, chatting with the girls while
we waited for the signals to fall, should be on their way to kill other
mild-eyed men, who perhaps away in Germany were kissing other
girls, for gifts of fruit and flowers.

22

It was at this station near Toul that I heard the first words of hatred.
They were in a conversation between two French soldiers who had
come with us from Paris. They had heard that some Germans had
already been taken prisoners across the frontier, and they were angry
that the men were still alive.

"Prisoners? Pah! Name of a dog! I will tell you what I would do with
German prisoners!"

It was nothing nice that that man wanted to do with German
prisoners. He indulged in long and elaborate details as to the way in
which he would wreath their bowels about his bayonet and tear out
their organs with his knife. The other man had more imagination. He
devised more ingenious modes of torture so that the Germans should
not die too soon.

I watched the men as they spoke. They had the faces of murderers,
with bloodshot eyes and coarse features, swollen with drink and vice.
There was a life of cruelty in the lines about their mouths, and in their
husky laughter. Their hands twitched and their muscles gave
convulsive jerks, as they worked themselves into a fever of blood-
lust. In the French Revolution it was such men as these who leered
up at the guillotine and laughed when the heads of patrician women
fell into the basket, and who did the bloody Work of the September
massacre. The breed had not died out in France, and war had
brought it forth from its lairs again.

23

These men were not typical of the soldiers of Fr