It was a few minutes before midnight on that Friday, when they came back along the road to Amiens, crawling back slowly in a long, dismal trail, with ambulance wagons laden with dead and dying, with hay-carts piled high with saddles and accoutrements upon which there lay, immobile, like men already dead, spent and exhausted soldiers.  They passed through crowds of silent people—­the citizens of Amiens—­ who only whispered as they stared at this procession in the darkness.  A cuirassier with his head bent upon his chest stumbled forward, leading a horse too weak and tired to bear him.  There were many other men leading their poor beasts in this way; and infantry soldiers, some of them with bandaged heads, clung on to the backs of the carts and wagons, and seemed to be asleep as they shuffled by.  The light from the roadside lamps gleamed upon blanched faces and glazed eyes—­flashed now and then into the caverns of canvas-covered carts where twisted, bandaged men lay huddled on the straw.  Not a groan came from those carts.  There was no shout of “Vive la France!” from the crowd of citizens who are not silent as a rule when their soldiers pass.

Every one knew it was a retreat, and the knowledge was colder than the mist of night.  The carts, carrying the quick and the dead, rumbled by in a long convoy, the drooping heads of the soldiers turned neither to the right nor to the left for any greeting with old friends; there was a hugger-mugger of uniforms on provision carts and ambulances.  It was a part of the wreckage and wastage of the war, and to the onlooker, exaggerating unconsciously the importance of the things close at hand and visible, it seemed terrible in its significance, and an ominous reminder of 1870, when through Amiens there came the dismal tramp of beaten men.  Really this was the inevitable part of a serious battle, and not necessarily the retreat from a great disaster.

I turned away from it, rather sick at heart.  It is not a pleasant thing to see men walking like living corpses, or as though drugged with fatigue.  It is heartrending to see poor beasts stumbling forward at every step at the very last gasp of their strength until they fall never to rise again.

But more pitiful even than this drift back from Bapeaume were the scenes which followed immediately as I turned back into the town.  Thousands of boys had been called out to the colours, and had been brought up from the country to be sent forward to the second lines of defence.  They were the reservists of the 1914 class, and many of them were shouting and singing, though here and there a white-faced boy tried to hide his tears as women from the crowd ran to embrace him.  The Marseillaise, the hymn of faith, rang out a little raggedly, but bravely all the same.  The lads—­“poor children” they were called by a white-haired man who watched them—­were keeping up the valour of their hearts by noisy demonstrations; but having seen the death-carts pass through the darkness between lines of silent and dejected onlookers, I could not bear to look into the faces of those little ones of France who were following their fathers to the guns.  Once again I had to turn away to blot out the pictures of war in the velvety darkness of the night.