Nothing could be more mirth-provoking than that sight; yet, strangely enough, the most tear-compelling memory of the war is connected with another bird-cage.  Two children rummaging through their ruined home dug it out of the debris.  In it was their little pet canary.  While fire and smoke rolled through the house it had beat its wings against the bars in vain.  Its prison had become its tomb.  Its feathers were but slightly singed, yet it was dead with that pathetic finality which attaches itself to only a dead bird—­its silver songs and flutterings, once the delight of the children, now stilled forever.

The photographers had long looked for what they termed a first-class sob-picture.  Here it was par excellent.  The larger child stood stroking the feathers of her pet and murmuring over and over “Poor Annette,” “Poor Annette!” Then the smaller one snuggling the limp little thing against her neck wept inconsolably.

Instead of seizing their opportunity, the movie man was clearing his throat while the free lance was busy on what he said was a cinder in his eye.  Yet this very man had brought back from the Balkan War of 1907 a prime collection of horrors; corpses thrown into the death-cart with arms and legs sticking out like so much stubble; the death-cart creeping away with its ghastly load; and the dumping together of bodies of men and beasts into a pit to be eaten by the lime.  This man who had gone through all this with good nerve was now touched to tears by two children crying over their pet canary.  There are some things that are too much for the heart of even a war-photographer.

To give the whole exodus the right tragic setting, one is tempted to write that tears were streaming down all the faces of the refugees, but on the contrary, indeed, most of them carried a smile and a pipe, and trudged stolidly along, much as though bound for a fair.  Some of our pictures show laughing refugees.  That may not be fair, for man is so constituted that the muscles of his face automatically relax to the click of the camera.  But as I recall that pitiful procession, there was in it very little outward expression of sorrow.

Undoubtedly there was sadness enough in all their hearts, but people in Europe have learned to live on short rations; they rarely indulge in luxuries like weeping, but bear the most unwonted afflictions as though they were the ordinary fortunes of life.  War has set a new standard for grief.  So these victims passed along the road, but not before the record of their passing was etched for ever on our moving-picture films.  The coming generation will not have to reconstruct the scene from the colored accounts of the journalist, but with their own eyes they can see the hegira of the homeless as it really was.

The resignation of the peasant in the face of the great calamity was a continual source of amazement to us.  Zola in “Le Debacle” puts into his picture of the battle of Sedan an old peasant plowing on his farm in the valley.  While shells go screaming overhead he placidly drives his old white horse through the accustomed furrows.  One naturally presumed that this was a dramatic touch of the great novelist.  But similar incidents we saw in this Great War over and over again.