“We’ve been at it night and day,” he said.  “The only rest from fighting was when we were marching with the beggars after us.”

He spoke of the German army as “a blighted nation on the move.”

“You can’t mow that down.  We kill ’em and kill ’em, and still they come on.  They seem to have an endless line of fresh men.  Directly we check ’em in one attack a fresh attack develops.  It’s impossible to hold up such a mass of men.  Can’t be done, nohow!”

This man, severely wounded, was so much master of himself, so strong in common sense that he was able to get the right perspective about the general situation.

“It’s not right to say we’ve met with disaster,” he remarked.  “Truth’s truth.  We’ve suffered pretty badly—­perhaps twelve per cent, of a battalion knocked out.  But what’s that?  You’ve got to expect it nowadays.  ’Taint a picnic.  Besides, what if a battalion was cut up—­ wiped clean out, if you like?  That don’t mean defeat.  While one regiment suffered another got off light.”

And by the words of that sergeant of the Essex Regiment I was helped to see the truth of what had happened.  He took the same view as many officers and men to whom I had spoken, and by weighing up the evidence, in the light of all that I had seen and heard, and with the assistance of my friend the Philosopher—­whose wisdom shone bright after a glass of Dubonnet and the arsenic pill which lifted him out of the gulfs of the black devil doubt to heights of splendid optimism based upon unerring logic—­I was able to send a dispatch to England which cheered it after a day of anguish.

12

Because I also was eager to reach the coast—­not to escape from the advancing Germans, for I had determined that I would do desperate things to get back for the siege of Paris, if history had to be written that way—­but because I must find a boat to carry a dispatch across the Channel, I waited with the crowd of fugitives, struggled with them for a seat in the train which left at dawn and endured another of those journeys when discomfort mocked at sleep, until sheer exhaustion made one doze for a minute of unconsciousness from which one awakened with a cricked neck and cramped limbs, to a reality of tragic things.

We went by a tortuous route, round Paris towards the west, and at every station the carriages were besieged by people trying to escape.

“Pour l’amour de Dieu, laissez-moi entrer!”

“J’ai trois enfants, messieurs!  Ayez un peu de pitie!” “Cre nom de Dieu, c’est le dernier train!  Et j’ai peur pour les petits.  Nous sommes tous dans le meme cas, n’est-ce-pas?”

But entreaties, piteous words, the exhibition of frightened children and wailing babes could not make a place in carriages already packed to bursting-point.  It was impossible to get one more human being inside.

“C’est impossible!  C’est absolument impossible!  Regardez!  On ne peut pas faire plus de place, Madame!”