“Dieu! ...  C’est trop! c’est trop!”

All day long these scenes went on, until I could bear them no longer, but went indoors to the room which made me feel a selfish monster because I shared it with only two friends.  Boulogne became quiet in the darkness.  Perhaps by some miracle all those homeless ones had found a shelter. ...  I awakened out of a drowsy sleep to hear the tramp of innumerable feet.  A new army of fugitives had come into the town, I heard voices murmuring below my window, arguing, pleading.  There was a banging at doors down the street.

“C’est impossible!  Il n’y a pas de place!  Il y a une foule qui dort en plein air.  Voyez! voyez!”

The night porter slammed his own door in a rage.  Perhaps there was pity in his heart as well as rage, but what can a man do when people demand admittance to an hotel where there are already six people in the bathroom and sixty on the floor of the salon, and stiff bodies wrapped in blankets, like corpses in eternal sleep, lying about in the corridors?

“There are crowds of people sleeping in the open air,” he said, and when I leaned out of the window, staring into the darkness of the night and breathing in the cool air which had an autumn touch, I saw dimly on the pavement below huddled figures in the doorways and under the shelter of the eaves.  A baby wailed with a thin cry.  A woman’s voice whimpered just below my window, and a man spoke to her.

“C’est la guerre!”

The words came up to me as though to answer the question in my own mind as to why such things should be.

“C’est la guerre!”

Yes, it was war; with its brutality against women and children, its horrible stupidity, its senseless overthrow of all life’s decencies, and comforts, and security.  The non-combatants were not to be spared, though they had not asked for war, and hated it.

Chapter IV The Way Of Retreat

1

Ominous things were happening behind the screen.  Good God! was France to see another annee terrible, a second edition of 1870, with the same old tale of unreadiness, corruption in high quarters, breakdown of organization, and national humiliation after irreparable disasters?

The very vagueness of the official communiques and their word-jugglings to give a rose colour to black shadows advancing rapidly over the spirit of France suggested horrible uncertainties to those who were groping in search of plain truth.  But not all the severity of the censorship, with its strangle-grip upon the truth-tellers, could hide certain frightful facts.  All these refugees pouring down from the north could not be silenced, though none of their tales appeared in print.  They came with the news that Lille was invested, that the German tide was rolling upon Armentieres, Roubaix, Tourcoing and Cambrai, that the French and English were in hard retreat.  The enemy’s cavalry was spreading out in a great fan, with outposts of Uhlans riding into villages where old French peasants had not dreamed of being near the line of battle until, raising their heads from potato fields or staring across the stacked corn, they had seen the pointed casques and the flash of the sun on German carbines.