Young women who had stepped out so jauntily at first were footsore and lame, so that they limped along with lines of pain about their lips and eyes.  Many of the taxi-cabs, bought at great prices, and many of the motor-cars had broken down and had been abandoned by their owners, who had decided to walk.

Farmers’ carts had jolted into ditches and had lost their wheels.  Wheelbarrows, too heavy to trundle, had been tilted up, with all their household goods spilt into the roadway, and the children had been carried further, until at last darkness came, and their only shelter was a haystack in a field under the harvest moon.

I entered Paris again from the south-west, after crossing the Seine where it makes a loop to the north-west beyond the forts of St. Germain and St. Denis.  The way seemed open to the enemy.  Always obsessed with the idea that the Germans would come from the east—­ the almost fatal error of the French General Staff, Paris had been girdled with forts on that side, from those of Ecouen and Montmorency by the distant ramparts of Chelles and Champigny to those of Sucy and Villeneuve—­the outer lines of a triple cordon.  But on the western side there was next to nothing, and it was a sign to me of the utter unreadiness of France that now at the eleventh hour when I passed thousands of men were digging trenches in the roads and fields with frantic haste, and throwing up earthworks along the banks of the Seine.  Great God! that such work should not have been done weeks before and not left like this to a day when the enemy’s guns were rumbling through Creil and smashing back the allied armies in retreat!

It was a pitiful thing to see the deserted houses of the Paris suburbs.  It was as though a plague had killed every human being save those who had fled in frantic haste.  Those little villas on the riverside, so coquette in their prettiness, built as love nests and summer-houses, were all shuttered and silent Roses were blowing in their gardens, full-blown because no woman’s hand had been to pick them, and spilling their petals on the garden paths.  The creeper was crimsoning on the walls and the grass plots were like velvet carpeting, so soft and deeply green.  But there were signs of disorder, of some hurried transmigration.  Packing-cases littered the trim lawns and cardboard boxes had been flung about.  In one small bower I saw a child’s perambulator, where two wax dolls sat staring up at the abandoned house.  Their faces had become blotchy in the dew of night, and their little maman with her pigtail had left them to their fate.  In another garden a woman’s parasol and flower-trimmed hat lay on a rustic seat with an open book beside them.  I imagined a lady of France called suddenly away from an old romance of false sentiment by the visit of grim reality—­the first sound of the enemy’s guns, faint but terrible to startled ears.

“Les Allemands sont tout pres!”

Some harsh voice had broken into the quietude of the garden on the Seine, and the open book, with the sunshade and the hat, had been forgotten in the flight.