On that last stage of the retreat we lost less men than any text-book of war would have given as a credible number in such conditions.  Many who were wounded as they tramped through woods splintered by bursting shells and ripped with bullets, bandaged themselves as best they could and limped on, or were carried by loyal comrades who would not leave a pal in the lurch.  Others who lost their way or lay down in sheer exhaustion, cursing the Germans and not caring if they came, straggled back later—­weeks later—­by devious routes to Rouen or Paris, after a wandering life in French villages, where the peasants fed them and nursed them so that they were in no hurry to leave.  It was the time when the temptation to desert seized men with a devilish attraction.  They had escaped from such hells at Charleroi and Cambrai and Le Cateau.  Boys who had never heard the roar of guns before except in mimic warfare had crouched and cowered beneath a tempest of shells, waiting, terrified, for death.  Death had not touched them.  By some miracle they had dodged it, with dead men horribly mutilated on either side of them, so that blood had slopped about their feet and they had jerked back from shapeless masses of flesh—­of men or horses—­sick with the stench of it, cold with the horror of it.  Was it any wonder that some of these young men who had laughed on the way to Waterloo Station, and held their heads high in the admiring gaze of London crowds, sure of their own heroism, slunk now in the backyards of French farmhouses, hid behind hedges when men in khaki passed, and told wild, incoherent tales, when cornered at last by some cold-eyed officer in some town of France to which they had blundered?  It was the coward’s chance, and I for one can hardly bring myself to blame the poor devil I met one day in Rouen, stuttering out lies, to save his skin, or the two gunners, disguised in civil clothes, who begged from me near Amiens, or any of the half-starved stragglers who had “lost” their regiments and did not go to find them.  Some of them were shot and deserved their fate, according to the rules of war and the stern justice of men who know no fear.  But in this war there are not many men who have not known moments of cold terror, when all their pride of manhood oozed away and left them cowards, sick with horror at all the frightfulness.  Out of such knowledge pity comes.

It was pity and a sense of impending tragedy which took hold of me in Creil and on the way to Paris when I was confronted with the confusion of the British retreat, and, what seemed its inevitable consequences, the siege and fall of the French capital.

11

I reached Paris in the middle of the night on September 2 and saw extraordinary scenes.  It had become known during the day that German outposts had reached Senlis and Chantilly, and that Paris was no longer the seat of Government.  Quietly and without a word of warning the French Ministry had stolen away, after a Cabinet meeting at which there had been both rage and tears, and after a frantic packing up of papers in Government offices.  This abandonment came as a paralysing shock to the citizens of Paris and was an outward and visible sign that the worst thing might happen—­a new siege of Paris, with greater guns than those which girdled it in the terrible year.