Now It Can Be Told

erman victory (the common people did not think this, at first, but saw only the outrage to Belgium, a brutal attack on civilization,

me of us had gone to the Balkan War, and others. The Old Guard of war correspondents besieged the War Office for official recognition and were insulted day after day by junior staff-officers who knew that "K" hated these men and thought

ice was postpone

itives of fear, where millions of women and children and old people became wanderers along the roads in a tide of human misery, with the red flame of war behind them and following them, and where the first battalions of youth, so gay in their approach to war, so confident of victory, so careless of the dangers (which they did not know), came back maimed and mangled and blinded and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat, which presently became a spate through Belgium and the north of France, swamping

olleague along the corridor,

he was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her husband was in the battle that was now being fought round their own town. She was brave-pointed out the line of the G

age, p'tite maman!" s

rassiers stumbled as they led their tired horses. Crowds of people with white faces, like ghosts in the dar

whispered a woman, a

ng a place for the sake of their babes. There was no food for them on journeys of nineteen hours or more; they fainted with heat and

f wounded. They were laid out stretcher by stretcher in station-yards, five hundred at a time. Some of their faces were mas

with one day's wounded. The French doctor in charge had received a telegram from the director of me

le!" said the F

housand people coming across the Scheldt in rowing-boats, sailing-craft, rafts, invaded one village in Holland. They had no food. Children were mad with fright. Young mothers had no milk in their breasts. It w

rins-lay dead about the Grande Place. In the Town Hall, falling to bits under shell-fire, a colonel stood dazed and waiting for death amid the de

in a town that had been built for love and pretty women and the lucky people of the world. British monitors lying close into shore were answering the German bombardment, firing over Nieuport to the

O ma pauvre p'tite fem

of '14. They were the cries of youth's agony in war. Afterward I went across the fields where they fought and saw their bodies and their graves, and the proof of the

lish, Irish, Scottish soldiers, stragglers from units still keeping some kind of order, were coming in, bronzed, dusty, parched with thirst, with light wounds tied round with rags, with blistered feet. French soldiers, bearded, dirty, thirsty as dogs, crowded the station platforms. They, too, had been retreating

owder, ready to blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and broken bottles... In Paris there was a great fear and solitude, except where grief-stricken crowds

x months of war-as afterward-came back the tide of wounded; wounded everywhere, mai

thes which were smeared with blood of French and Belgian soldiers whom I had helped, in a week of strange adventure, to carry to the surgeons. As an onlooker of war I hated the people who had not seen,