“We got it in the neck!” said the sergeant of the R.F.A.  He repeated the words as if they held all truth.  “We got it in the neck!” “Where?” I asked.

He waved his wounded hand northwards, and said:  “Mons.”

“Do you mean we were beaten?  In retreat?” He shrugged his shoulders.

“We gave ’em what for.  Oh, yes, they had to pay right enough.  But they were too much for us.  Came on like lice... swarming...  Couldn’t kill enough...  Then we got it in the neck...  Lost a good few men...  Gord, I’ve never seen such work!  South Africa?  No more than child’s play to this ’ere game!”

He gave a queer kind of grin, with no mirth in his eyes, and went away with the other wounded men.

Mons?  It was the first I had heard of a battle there And our men were having a hard time.  The enemy were too much for us.  Was it a retreat?  Perhaps a rout?

18

The Philosopher answered these unspoken questions.

“You always get the gloomy view from wounded men.  I dare say it’s not an easy thing to stop those blighters, but I’ve faith in the justice of God.  The Great Power ain’t going to let Prussian militarism win out.  It’s going to be smashed because of its essential rottenness.  It’s all right, laddie!”

The Strategist was studying his map, and working out military possibilities.

“Mons. I expect our next line of defence will be Le Cateau and Cambrai.  If we’re hard pressed we shall hear something about St. Quentin, too.  It’s quite on the cards we shall have to fall back, but I hope to Heaven in good order and with sound lines of communication.”

“It’s frightful!” I said.  “We are seeing nothing of all this.  Nothing!  If only we could get near it!”

19

It was some time before we heard the guns, but not long before we saw the effects of war, in blood, anguish, and tears.

The French newspapers, telling little of the truth, giving barely one single fact to a page full of heroic sentiment, had not let us guess that, beyond the frontiers of France, the enemy was doing frightful damage, with a rapidity and ruthlessness which, after the check at Liege, was a tremendous menace to the Allied armies.  I understood these things better, in a stark nakedness of truth, when I found myself caught in the tumult of a nation in flight.

I have already touched upon one tide of panic—­the stampede of the pleasure-seekers.  That was a mere jest lacking all but the touch of cruelty which gives a spice to so many of life’s witticisms; but the second tide, overflowing in wave after wave of human misery, reached great heights of tragedy which submerged all common griefs.  From that day in August until many months of war had passed I was seldom out of sight of this ruin of Belgium.