There were refugees who had seen the beginning of battles, taking flight before the end of them.  I met some from Le Cateau, who had stared speechlessly at familiar hills over which came without warning great forces of foreign soldiers.  The English had come first, in clouds of dust which powdered their uniforms and whitened their sun-baked faces.  They seemed in desperate hurry and scratched up mounds of loose earth, like children building sand castles, and jumped down into wayside ditches which they used as cover, and lay on their stomachs in the beetroot fields.  They were cheerful enough, and laughed as they littered the countryside with beef tins, and smoked cigarettes incessantly, as they lay scorched under the glare of the sun, with their rifles handy.  Their guns were swung round with their muzzles nosing towards the rising ground from which these English soldiers had come.  It seemed as though they were playing games of make believe, for the fun of the thing.  The French peasants had stood round grinning at these English boys who could not understand a word of French, but chattered cheerfully all the time in their own strange language.  War seemed very far away.  The birds were singing in a shrill chorus.  Golden flowerlets spangled the green slopes.  The sun lay warm upon the hillside, and painted black shadows beneath the full foliage of the trees.  It was the harvest peace which, these peasants had known all the years of their lives.  Then suddenly the click of rifle bolts, a rapid change in the attitude of the English soldier boys, who stared northwards where the downs rose and fell in soft billows, made the French peasants j gaze in that direction, shading their eyes from the hot sun.  What was that grey shadow moving?  What were those little glints and flashes in the greyness of it?  What were all those thousands of little ant-like things crawling forward over the slopes?  Thousands and scores of thousands of—­men, and horses and guns!

“Les Anglais?  Toujours les Anglais?” An English officer laughed, in a queer way, without any mirth in his eyes.

“Les Allemands, mon vieux.  Messieurs les Boches!”

“L’enemi?  Non—­pas possible!”

It only seemed possible that it was the enemy when from that army of ants on the hillsides there came forth little puffs of white smoke, and little stabbing flames, and when, quite soon, some of those English boys lay in a huddled way over their rifles, with their sunburned faces on the warm earth.  The harvest peace was broken by the roar of guns and the rip of bullets.  Into the blue of the sky rose clouds of greenish smoke.  Pieces of jagged steel, like flying scythes, sliced the trees on the roadside.  The beetroot fields spurted up earth, and great holes were being dug by unseen ploughs.  Then, across the distant slopes behind the smoke clouds and the burst of flame came, and came, a countless army, moving down towards those British soldiers.  So the peasants had fled with a great fear.