For months, in every part of France there were thousands of husbands who had lost their wives and children, thousands of families who had been divided hopelessly in the wild confusion of retreats from a brutal soldiery.  They had disappeared into the maelstrom of fugitives—­wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and old grandmother, most of them without money and all of them dependent for their lives upon the hazard of luck.  Every day in the French newspapers there were long lists of inquiries.

“M.  Henri Planchet would be deeply grateful to anyone who can inform him of the whereabouts of his wife, Suzanne, and of his two little girls, Berthe and Marthe, refugees from Armentieres.”

“Mme. Tardieu would be profoundly grateful for information about her daughter, Mme. des Rochers, who fled from the destroyed town of Albert on October 10, with her four children.”

Every day I read some of these lists, finding a tragedy in every line, and wondering whether any of these missing people were among those whom I had met in the guard vans of troop trains, huddled among their bundles, or on wayside platforms, or in the long columns of retreating inhabitants from a little town deep in a wooded valley below the hills where German guns were vomiting their shrapnel.

Imagine such a case in England.  A man leaves his office in London and takes the train to Guildford, where his wife and children are waiting supper for him.  At Weybridge the train comes to a dead-halt.  The guard runs up to the engine-driver, and comes back to say that the tunnel has been blown up by the enemy.  It is reported that Guildford and all the villages around have been invaded.  Families flying from Guildford describe the bombardment of the town.  A part of it is in flames.  The Guildhall is destroyed.  Many inhabitants have been killed.  Most of the others have fled.

The man who was going home to supper wants to set out to find his wife and children.  His friends hold him back in spite of his struggles.  “You are mad!” they shout.  “Mad!"...  He has no supper at home that night.  His supper and his home have been burnt to cinders.  For weeks he advertises in the papers for the whereabouts of his wife and babes.  Nobody can tell him.  He does not know whether they are dead or alive.

There were thousands of such cases in France.  I have seen this tragedy—­a man weeping for his wife and children swallowed up into the unknown after the destruction of Fives, near Lille.  A new-born babe was expected.  On the first day of life it would receive a baptism of fire.  Who could tell this distracted man whether the mother or child were alive?

3

There were many villages in France around Lille and Armentieres, Amiens and Arras, and over a wide stretch of country in Artois and Picardy, where, in spite of all weariness, women who lay down beside their sleeping babes could find no sleep for themselves.  For who could say what the night would bring forth?  Perhaps a patrol of Uhlans, who shot peasants like rabbits as they ran across the fields, and who demanded wine, and more wine, until in the madness of drink they began to burn and destroy for mere lust of ruin.  So it was at Senlis, at Sermaize, and in many villages in the region through which I passed.