a port of France in time for the next boat home and staying in Fleet Street only a few hours before hurrying back to Dover or Folkestone in order to plunge again into the fever of invaded France.  Later Paris was our goal, and we would struggle back to it along lines choked with munitions of war or completely held for the transport of great masses of troops, arriving, at night as a rule, weary for lack of sleep, dirty from the filth of cattle trucks crowded with unwashed men and women, hungry after meagre rations of biscuits and cheese, mentally and physically exhausted, so that one such night I had to be carried upstairs to my room, so weak that I could not drag one leg after the other nor lift a hand from the coverlet.  On another day one of my companions—­the Strategist—­sat back, rather quiet, in a taxi-cab which panted in a wheezy way along the interminably straight roads of France, through villages from which all their people had fled under the shadow of a great fear which followed them, until when the worn-out vehicle could go no further, but halted helplessly on a lonely highway remote as it seemed from any habitation, my friend confessed that he was weak even as a new-born babe and could not walk a hundred yards to save his life.  Yet he is a strong man who had never been in a doctor’s hands since childhood.

His weakness, the twist of pain about his mouth, the weariness in his eyes, scared us then.  The Philosopher, who had not yet begun to feel in his bones the heat of the old tropical fever which afterwards made him toss at nights and call out strange words, shook his head and spoke with the enormous gravity which gives an air of prophecy and awful wisdom to a man whose sense of humour and ironic wit have often twisted me into painful knots of mirth.  But there was no glint of humour in the Philosopher’s eyes when he stared at the greyness of the Strategist.

“The pace has been too hot,” he said.  “We seem to forget that there’s a limit to the strain we can put on the human machine.  It’s not only the physical fatigue.  It’s the continual output of nervous energy.  All this misery, all that damn thing over there”—­he waved his paw at the darkening hills beyond which was a great hostile army—­“the sight of all these refugees spilt out of their cities and homes as though a great hand had tipped up the earth, is beginning to tell on us, my lads.  We are spending our reserve force, and we are just about whacked!”

Yet we went on, mixed up always in refugee rushes, in masses of troops moving forward to the front or backwards in retreat, getting brief glimpses of the real happenings behind the screen of secrecy, meeting the men who could tell us the hidden truth, and more than once escaping, by the nick of time only, from a death-trap into which we had tumbled unwittingly, not knowing the whereabouts of the enemy, nor his way of advance.

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