A woman’s voice was singing outside in the courtyard when I awakened next day.  How strange that any woman should sing in an undefended town confronted by such a peril.  But none of the girls about the streets had any fear in their eyes.  German frightfulness had not yet scared them with its nameless horrors.

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I did not stay in Nancy.  It was only the French War Office in Paris who could give permission for a correspondent to join the troops.  This unfortified town has never echoed in the war to the tramp of German feet, and its women’s courage has not been dismayed by the worst horrors.  But since those days of August 1914, many women’s faces have blanched at the sight of blood—­streams of blood sopping the stretchers in which the wounded have been carried back from the frontier, which seemed so quiet when I listened at the open window.  Those soldiers I talked to in the general headquarters—­how many of them are now alive?  They were the men who fought in Alsace and Lorraine, when whole battalions were decimated under a withering shell-fire beyond the endurance of human courage, and who marched forward to victories, and backward in retreats, and forward again over the dead bodies of their comrades and corrupting heaps of German dead, in an ebb and flow of warfare which made the fields and the woods one great stench of horror, from which there came back madmen and maimed creatures, and young men, lucky with slight wounds, who told the tale of things they had seen as though they had escaped from hell.  I met some of them afterwards and turned sick and faint as I listened to their stories; and afterwards on the western side of the French front, three hundred miles from Nancy, I came upon the dragoons of Belfort who had ridden past me in the sunshine of those August days.  Then they had been very fine to see in their clean uniforms and on their glossy horses, garlanded with flowers.  At the second meeting they were stained and warworn, and their horses limped with drooping heads, and they rode as men who have seen many comrades fall and have been familiar with the ways of death.  They were fine to see again, those dirty, tired, grim-faced men.  But it was a different kind of beauty which sent a queer thrill through me as I watched them pass.

Chapter III The Secret War

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It was the most astounding thing in modern history, the secrecy behind which great armies were moving and fighting.  To a civilization accustomed to the rapid and detailed accounts of news, there was something stupefying in the veil of silence which enshrouded the operations of the legions which were being hurled against each other along the frontiers.  By one swift stroke of the military censorship journalism was throttled.  All its lines of communication were cut, suddenly, as when, in my office, I spoke from Paris to England, and found myself with a half-finished sentence before a telephone which would no longer