A rumour had come that the people were to be given five days’ notice to leave their houses within the zone of fortifications, and to add to the menace of impending horrors an aeroplane had dropped bombs upon the Gare de l’Est that afternoon.  There was a wild rush to get away from the capital, and the railway stations were great camps of fugitives, in which the richest and the poorest citizens were mingled, with their women and children.  The tragedy deepened when it was heard that most of the lines to the coast had been cut and that the only remaining line to Dieppe would probably be destroyed during the next few hours.  From the crowds which had been waiting all day for a chance to get to the guichets in the rear of other and greater crowds, there rose a murmur which seemed to me like a great sigh from stricken hearts.  There were many old men and women there who knew what a siege of Paris meant.  To younger people they told the tale of it now—­the old familiar tale—­with shaking heads and trembling forefingers.  “Starvation!” “We ate rats, if we were lucky.”  “They would not hesitate to smash up Notre Dame.”  “It is not for my sake I would go.  But the little ones!  Those poor innocents!”

They did not make much noise in those crowds.  There was no loud sound of panic.  No woman’s voice shrieked or wailed above the murmurs of voices.  There was no fighting for the station platforms barred against them all.  A few women wept quietly, mopping their eyes.  Perhaps they wept for sheer weariness after sitting encamped for hours on their baggage.  Most of the men had a haggard look and kept repeating the stale old word, “Incroyable!” in a dazed and dismal way.  Sadness as well as fear was revealed in the spirit of those fugitives, a sadness that Paris, Paris the beautiful, should be in danger of destruction, and that all her hopes of victory had ended in this defeat.

Among all these civilians were soldiers of many regiments and of two nations—­Turcos and Zouaves, chasseurs and infantry, regulars and Highland British.  Many of these were wounded and lay on the floor among the crying babies and weary-eyed women.  Many of them were drinking and drunk.  They clinked glasses and pledged each other in French and English and broadest Scotch, with a “Hell to the Kaiser!” and “a bas Guillaume!” A Tommy with the accent of the Fulham Road stood on a chair, steadying himself by a firm grasp on the shoulder of a French dragon, and made an incoherent speech in which he reviled the French troops as dirty dogs who ran away like mongrels, vowed that he would never have left England for such a bloody game if he had known the rights of it, and hoped Kitchener would break his blooming neck down the area of Buckingham Palace.  The French soldier greeted these sentiments with a “Bravo, mon vieux!” not understanding a word of them, and the drunkard swayed and fell across the marble-topped table, amid a crash of broken glass.

“Serve him damn well right!” said a sergeant to whom I had been talking.  Like many other English soldiers here who had been fighting for ten days in retreat, he had kept his head, and his heart.