But presently I saw a human form.  It was the figure of a French dragoon, with his carbine slung behind his back.  He was standing by the side of a number of gunpowder bags.  A little further away were groups of soldiers at work by two bridges—­one over a stream and one over a road.  They were working very calmly, and I could see what they were doing.  They were mining the bridges to blow them up at a given signal.  As I went further I saw that the streets were strewn with broken bottles and littered with wire entanglements, very artfully and carefully made.

It was a queer experience.  It was obvious that there was a very grim business being done in Beauvais, and that the soldiers were waiting for something to happen.  At the railway station I quickly learnt the truth.  The Germans were only a few miles away in great force.  At any moment they might come down, smashing everything in their way, and killing every human being along that road.  The station master, a brave old type, and one or two porters, had determined to stay on to the last.  “Nous sommes ici,” he said, as though the Germans would have to reckon with him.  But he was emphatic in his request for me to leave Beauvais if another train could be got away, which was very uncertain.  As a matter of fact, after a mauvais quart d’heure, I was put into a train which had been shunted into a siding and left Beauvais with the sound of the German guns in my ears.

Sitting in darkness and shaken like peas in a pod because of defective brakes, we skirted the German army, and by a twist in the line almost ran into the enemy’s country; but we rushed through the night, and the engine-driver laughed and put his oily hand up to the salute when I stepped out to the platform of an unknown station.

“The Germans won’t have us for dinner after all,” he said.  “It was a little risky all the same!”

9

The station was Creil, the headquarters, at that time, of the British forces.  It was crowded with French soldiers, and they were soon telling me their experience of the hard fighting in which they had been engaged.

They were dirty, unshaven, dusty from head to foot, scorched by the heat of the August sun, in tattered uniforms, and broken boots.  But they were beautiful men for all their dirt; and the laughing courage, the quiet confidence, the un-bragging simplicity with which they assured me that the Germans would soon be caught in a death-trap and sent to their destruction, filled me with an admiration which I cannot express in words.  All the odds were against them; they had fought the hardest of all actions along the way of retreat; they knew and told me that the enemy were fighting at Senlis, within ten miles of the Parisian fortifications, but they had an absolute faith in the ultimate success of their allied arms.

One of the French soldiers gave me his diary to read.  In spite of his dirty uniform, his brown unwashed hands and the blond unkempt beard which disguised fine features and a delicate mouth, it was clear to see that he was a man of good breeding and education.