So it seemed to me then, before I had seen greater ghastliness.  I was surprised also by the cheerfulness of some of our wounded soldiers.  They were the “light cases,” and had the pluck to laugh at their pain.  Yet even they had had a dreadful time.  It is almost true to say that the only rest they had was when they were carried into the ambulance cart or the field-hospital.  The incessant marching, forwards and backwards, to new positions in the blazing sun was more awful to bear than the actual fighting under the hideous fire of the German guns.  They were kept on the move constantly, except for the briefest lulls—­when officers and men dropped, like brown leaves from autumn trees, on each side of the road, so utterly exhausted that they were almost senseless, and had to be dragged up out of their short sleep when once again they tramped on to a new line, to scratch up a few earthworks, to fire a few rounds before the bugle sounded the cease fire and another strategical retirement.

6

On September 2 the Germans had reached Creil and Senlis—­staining their honour in these two places by unnecessary cruelty—­and were no further than thirty miles from Paris, so that the shock of their guns might be heard as vague vibrations in the capital.

To the population of Paris, and to all civilians in France, it seemed a stupendous disaster, this rapid incredible advance of that great military machine of death which nothing, so far, had been able to stop—­not even the unflinching courage and the utter recklessness of life with which the Allies flung themselves against it.  Yet with an optimism which I could hardly justify, I, who had seen the soldiers of France, was still confident that, so far from all being lost, there was hope of victory which might turn the German advance.

I had seen the superb courage of French regiments rushing up to support their left wing, and the magnificent confidence of men who after the horrors of the battlefields, and with the full consciousness that they were always retiring, still, said:  “We shall win.  We are leading the enemy to its destruction.  In a little while they will be in a death-trap from which there is no escape for them.”

“This spirit,” I wrote in my dispatch, “must win in the end.  It is impossible that it should be beaten in the long run.  And the splendour of this French courage, in the face of what looks like defeat, is equalled at least by the calm and dogged assurance of our English troops.”

They repeated the same words to me over and over again—­those wounded men, those outposts at points of peril, those battalions who went marching on to another fight, without sleep, without rest, knowing the foe they had to meet.

“We are all right.  You can call it a retreat if you like.  But we are retreating in good order and keeping our end up.”

Retiring in good order I It had been more than that.  They had retired before a million of men swarming across the country like a vast ant-heap on the move, with a valour that had gained for the British and French forces a deathless glory.  Such a thing has never been done before in the history of warfare.  It would have seemed incredible and impossible to military experts, who know the meaning of such fighting, and the frightful difficulty of keeping an army together in such circumstances.