long afterwards that Paris heard
strange and evil rumours of reverses down there, of a regiment which
flung down its rifles and fled under a tempest of shells, of officers shot
by their own guns, of a general cashiered for grievous errors.

From Liege there came more news. The imagination of Paris,
deprived of all sustenance as regards its own troops, fed greedily
upon the banquet of blood which had been given to it by the gallant
Belgians. In messages coming irregularly through the days and
nights, three or four lines at a time, it was possible to grasp the main
facts of that heroic stand against the German legions. We were able
to perceive from afar the raking fire of the forts around the city, which
swept the ground so that the most famous regiments of the German
army were mowed down as they advanced with desperate courage.

"If Liege holds out the German troops are in a hopeless position."
These words were repeated along the boulevards of Paris, and
because Liege held out so long the spirit of Paris was exalted.

But, as a journalist out to see things, I was depressed. It was useless
to wait in Paris while the days were slipping by and history was being
made. Official permission was delayed, by fair and courteous words. I
decided to go in search of the war without permission and to get
somehow or other behind the scenes of its secrecy. So my
adventures began, and in a little while my eyes became seared with
the sight of tragedy and my soul filled with the enormous woe of war.

6

It was a strange kind of melodrama that experience in the first two
months of the war. Looking back upon it now, it has just the effect of
a prolonged nightmare stimulated by hasheesh or bang--fantastic, full
of confused dreams, changing kaleidoscopically from one scene to
another, with vivid clear-cut pictures, intensely imagined, between
gulfs of dim twilight memories, full of shadow figures, faces seen a
little while and then lost, conversations begun abruptly and then
ended raggedly, poignant emotions lasting for brief moments and
merging into others as strong but of a different quality, gusts of
laughter rising between moods of horrible depression, tears
sometimes welling from the heart and then choked back by a brutal
touch of farce, beauty and ugliness in sudden clashing contrasts, the
sorrow of a nation, the fear of a great people, the misery of women
and children, the intolerable anguish of multitudes of individuals each