idle to disguise the importance of this German victory at the time when France, with every nerve strained and with England by her side, could hardly stem back the tide of those overflowing armies which had been thrust across the Marne but now pressed westward towards Calais with a smashing strength.  The capture of Antwerp would liberate large numbers of the enemy’s best troops.  Already, within a day of this disaster to the Allied armies, squadrons of German cavalry swept across the frontiers into France, forcing their way rapidly through Lille and Armentieres towards Bethune and La Bassee, cutting lines which had already been cut and then repaired, and striking terror into French villages which had so far escaped from these hussars of death.  As a journalist, thwarted at every turn by the increasing severity of military orders for correspondent catching, the truth was not to be told at any cost.  I had suspected the doom of Antwerp some days before its fate was sealed, and I struck northward to get as near as possible to the Belgian frontier.  The nearest I could get was Dunkirk, and I came in time to see amazing scenes in that port of France.  They were scenes which, even now as I write months afterwards, stir me with pity and bring back to my imagination an immense tragedy of history.

2

The town of Dunkirk, from which I went out to many adventures in the heart of war, so that for me it will always hold a great memory, was on that day in October a place of wild chaos, filled with the murmur of enormous crowds, and with the steady tramp of innumerable feet which beat out a tragic march.  Those weary footsteps thumping the pavements and the cobble-stones, made a noise like the surging of waves on a pebble beach—­a queer, muffled, shuffling sound, with a rhythm in it which stupefied one’s senses if one listened to it long.  I think something of this agony of a people in flight passed into my own body and brain that day.  Some sickness of the soul took possession of me, so that I felt faint and overcome by black dejection.  There was a physical evil among those vast crowds of Belgians who had come on foot, or in any kind of vehicle, down the big, straight roads which led to France, and now struggled down towards the docks, where thousands were encamped.  From their weariness and inevitable dirtiness, from the sweat of their bodies, and the tears that had dried upon their cheeks, from the dust and squalor of bedraggled clothes, there came to one’s nostrils a sickening odour.  It was the stench of a nation’s agony.  Poor people of despair!  There was something obscene and hideous in your miserable condition.  Standing among your women and children, and your old grandfathers and grandmothers, I was ashamed of looking with watchful and observant eyes.  There were delicate ladies with their hats awry and their hair dishevelled, and their beautiful clothes bespattered and torn, so that they were like the drabs of the slums and stews.  There were young girls