I was tempted sometimes to yield up my place.  It seemed a coward thing to sit there jammed between two peasants while a white-faced woman with a child in her arms begged for a little pity and—­a little room.  But I had a message for the English people.  They, too, were in anguish because the enemy had come so close to Paris in pursuit of a little army which seemed to have been wiped out behind the screen of secrecy through which only vague and awful rumours came.  I sat still, shamefaced, scribbling my message hour after hour, not daring to look in the face of those women who turned away in a kind of sullen sadness after their pitiful entreaties.

Enormous herds of cattle were being driven into Paris.  For miles the roads were thronged with them, and down other roads away from Paris families were trekking to far fields, with their household goods piled into bullock carts, pony carts, and wheelbarrows.

At Pontoise there was another shock, for people whose nerves were frayed by fright.  Two batteries of artillery were stationed by the line, and a regiment of infantry was hiding in the hollows of the grass slopes.  Out of a nightmare dream not more fantastic than my waking hours so that there seemed no dividing line between illusion and reality, I opened my eyes to see those faces in the grass, bronzed bearded faces with anxious eyes, below a hedge of rifle barrels slanted towards the north.  The Philosopher had jerked out of slumber into a wakefulness like mine.  He rubbed his eyes and then sat bolt upright, with a tense searching look, as though trying to pierce to the truth of things by a violence of staring.

“It doesn’t look good,” he said.  “Those chaps in the grass seem to expect something—­something nasty!”

The Strategist had a map on his knees, which overlapped his fellow passenger’s on either side.

“If the beggars cut the line here it closes the way of escape from Paris.  It would be good business from their point of view.”

I was sorry my message to .the English people might never be read by them.  Perhaps after all they would get on very well without it, and my paper would appoint another correspondent to succeed a man swallowed up somewhere inside the German lines.  It would be a queer adventure.  I conjured up an imaginary conversation in bad German with an officer in a pointed casque.  Undoubtedly he would have the best of the argument.  There would be a little white wall, perhaps...

One of the enemy’s aeroplanes flew above our heads, circled round and then disappeared.  It dropped no bombs and was satisfied with its reconnaissance.  The whistle of the train shrieked out, and there was a cheer from the French gunners as we went away to safety, leaving them behind at the post of peril.

After all my message went to Fleet Street and filled a number of columns, read over the coffee cups by a number of English families, who said perhaps:  “I wonder if he really knows anything, or if it is all made up.  Those newspaper men...”