From Liege there came more news.  The imagination of Paris, deprived of all sustenance as regards its own troops, fed greedily upon the banquet of blood which had been given to it by the gallant Belgians.  In messages coming irregularly through the days and nights, three or four lines at a time, it was possible to grasp the main facts of that heroic stand against the German legions.  We were able to perceive from afar the raking fire of the forts around the city, which swept the ground so that the most famous regiments of the German army were mowed down as they advanced with desperate courage.

“If Liege holds out the German troops are in a hopeless position.”  These words were repeated along the boulevards of Paris, and because Liege held out so long the spirit of Paris was exalted.

But, as a journalist out to see things, I was depressed.  It was useless to wait in Paris while the days were slipping by and history was being made.  Official permission was delayed, by fair and courteous words.  I decided to go in search of the war without permission and to get somehow or other behind the scenes of its secrecy.  So my adventures began, and in a little while my eyes became seared with the sight of tragedy and my soul filled with the enormous woe of war.

6

It was a strange kind of melodrama that experience in the first two months of the war.  Looking back upon it now, it has just the effect of a prolonged nightmare stimulated by hasheesh or bang—­fantastic, full of confused dreams, changing kaleidoscopically from one scene to another, with vivid clear-cut pictures, intensely imagined, between gulfs of dim twilight memories, full of shadow figures, faces seen a little while and then lost, conversations begun abruptly and then ended raggedly, poignant emotions lasting for brief moments and merging into others as strong but of a different quality, gusts of laughter rising between moods of horrible depression, tears sometimes welling from the heart and then choked back by a brutal touch of farce, beauty and ugliness in sudden clashing contrasts, the sorrow of a nation, the fear of a great people, the misery of women and children, the intolerable anguish of multitudes of individuals each with a separate agony, making a dark background to this too real dream from which there was no awakening.

I was always travelling during those eight or nine weeks of history—­for the most time I had two companions with me—­dear fellows whose comradeship was a fine personal pleasure, in spite of all the pain into which we plunged.  Together we journeyed continually and prodigiously, covering thousands of miles during those weeks, in all sorts of directions, by all sorts of ways, in troop trains and cattle trucks, in motor-cars and taxi-cabs, and on Shanks’s nag.  There were no couriers in those days between France and England, and to get our dispatches home we often had to take them across the Channel, using most desperate endeavours to reach