So far, however, neither Paris nor the French public as a whole had any inkling of graver things than this.  They did not know—­how could they know anything of this secret war?—­that on all parts of the front the French armies’ were falling back before the German invasion which bore down upon them in five great columns of overwhelming strength; and that on the extreme left, nearest to Paris, the French army was miserably weak, made up for the most part of old Territorials who were never meant to be in the first line of defence, and of African regiments who had never seen shell-fire, so that the main German attack could only be held back by a little British army which had just set foot on the soil of France.

Everywhere, from east to west, the French were yielding before the terrific onslaught of the German legions, who came on in close formation, reckless of their losses, but always advancing, over the bodies of their dead, with masses of light artillery against which the French gunners, with all their skill and courage, could not hold ground.  By a series of strange adventures, which took me into the vortex of the French retreat, into the midst of confused movements of troops rushed up to various points of menace and into the tide of wounded which came streaming back from the fighting lines, I was able to write the first account which gave any clear idea of the general situation—­sharing this chance with the Philosopher and the Strategist who were my fellow travellers—­and, by good luck again, the censor was kind to me in England.  French officers and soldiers with bandaged heads and limbs told me their stories, while their wounds were still wet, and while their clothes still reeked of the smoke of battle.  Women who had fled with empty hands from little chateaux on the hillsides of France, with empty hearts too because they had no hope for husbands still fighting in the inferno, described to me the scenes which still made them pant like wild animals caught after a chase.  And with my own eyes I saw the unforgettable drama of the French army in retreat, blowing up bridges on its way, shifting to new lines of defence, awaiting with its guns ready for a new stage of the enemy’s advance.

Out of a wild confusion of impressions, the tumult of these scenes, the inevitable contradictions and inconsistencies and imaginings of men and women drunk with the excitement of this time, I sorted out some clear threads of fact and with the aid of the Strategist, who spread out his maps on wayside banks, blotting out the wild flowers, or on the marble-topped tables outside fly-blown estaminets in village streets, tracked out the line of the German advance and saw the peril of the French.

From one of my dispatches I transcribe a narrative which records one of the most bloody battles in the first phase of the war.  Written to the jolt of a troop train, in which wounded men hugged their bandaged hands, it tells how five thousand Frenchmen did their best to check a German army corps.