There were tragic individuals in these crowds.  I could only guess at some of their stories as they were written in lines of pain about the eyes and mouths of poor old spinsters such as Balzac met hiding their misery in backstairs flats of Paris tenements—­they came blinking out into the fierce sunlight of the Paris streets like captive creatures let loose by an earthquake—­and of young students who had eschewed delight and lived laborious days for knowledge and art which had been overthrown by war’s brutality.  All classes and types of life in Paris were mixed up in this retreat, and among them were men I knew, so that I needed no guesswork for their stories.  For weeks some of them had been working under nervous pressure, keeping “a stiff upper lip” as it is called to all rumours of impending tragedy.  But the contagion of fear had caught them in a secret way, and suddenly their nerves had snapped, and they too had abandoned courage and ideals of duty, slinking, as though afraid of daylight, to stations more closely sieged than Paris would be.  Pitiful wrecks of men, and victims of this ruthless war in which the non-combatants have suffered even more sometimes than the fighting men.  The neuroticism of the age was exaggerated by writing men—­we have seen the spirit of the old blood strong and keen—­but neurasthenia is not a myth, and God knows it was found out and made a torture to many men and women in the city of Paris, when the Great Fear came—­closing in with a narrowing circle until it seemed to clutch at the throats of those miserable beings.

There were thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who would not wait for the trains.  Along the southern road which goes down to Tours there were sixty unbroken miles of them.  They went in every kind of vehicle—­taxi-cabs for which rich people had paid fabulous prices, motor-cars which had escaped the military requisition, farmers’ carts laden with several families and piles of household goods, shop carts drawn by horses already tired to the point of death, because of the weight of the people who had crowded behind, pony traps, governess carts, and innumerable cycles.

But for the most part the people were on foot, and they trudged along, bravely at first, quite gay, some of them, on the first stage of the march; mothers carrying their babies, fathers hoisting children to their shoulders, families stepping out together.  They were of all classes, rank and fortune being annihilated by this common tragedy.  Elegant women, whose beauty is known in the Paris salons, whose frivolity perhaps in the past was the main purpose of their lives, were now on a level with the peasant mothers of the French suburbs, and with the midinettes of Montmartre—­and their courage did not fail them so quickly.

It was a tragic road.  At every mile of it there were people who had fainted on the wayside, and poor old people who could go no further but sat down on the banks below the hedges weeping silently or bidding the younger ones go forward and leave them to their fate.