Sometimes when I watched these scenes I raged against the villainy of a civilization which still permits these people to be sent like sheep to the slaughter.  Great God!  These poor wretches of the working quarters in Paris, these young peasants from the fields, these underpaid clerks from city offices had had no voice in the declaration of war.  What could they know about international politics?  Why should they be the pawns of the political chessboard, played without any regard for human life by diplomats and war lords and high financiers?  These poor weedy little men with the sallow faces of the clerical class, in uniforms which hung loose round their undeveloped frames, why should they be caught in the trap of this horrible machine called “War” and let loose like a lot of mice against the hounds of death?  These peasants with slouching shoulders and loose limbs and clumsy feet, who had been bringing in the harvest of France, after their tilling and sowing and reaping, why should they be marched off into tempests of shells which would hack off their strong arms and drench unfertile fields with their blood?  They had had to go, leaving all the things that had given a meaning and purpose to their days, as though God had commanded them, instead of groups of politicians among the nations of Europe, damnably careless of human life.  How long will this fetish of international intrigue be tolerated by civilized democracies which have no hatred against each other, until it is inflamed by their leaders and then, in war itself, by the old savageries of primitive nature?

14

I went down to the East frontier on the first day of mobilization.  It was in the evening when I went to take the train from the Gare de l’Est.  The station was filled with a seething crowd of civilians and soldiers, struggling to get to the booking-offices, vainly seeking information as to the times of departure to distant towns of France.  The railway officials were bewildered and could give no certain information.  The line was under military control.  Many trains had been suppressed and the others had no fixed time-table.  I could only guess at the purpose animating the individuals in these crowds.  Many of them, perhaps, were provincials, caught in Paris by the declaration of war and desperately anxious to get back to their homes before the lines were utterly choked by troop trains.  Others belonged to neutral countries and were trying to escape across the frontier before the gates were closed.  One of the “neutrals” spoke to me—­in German, which was a dangerous tongue in Paris.  He was a Swiss who had come to Paris on business for a few days, leaving his wife in a village near Basle.  It was of his wife that he kept talking.

“Ach, mein armes Weib!  Sie hat Angst fur mich.”