“What’s that?” asked a man in the carriage, sharply.

I thrust my head out of the carriage window and saw that all along the train other faces were staring out.  The guard was running down the platform.  The station-master was shouting to the engine-driver.  In a moment or two we began to back, and kept travelling backwards until we were out of the station...  The line had just been blown up beyond Arques by a party of Uhlans, and we were able to thank our stars that we had stopped in time.  We could get no nearer to Bethune, over which next day the tide of war had rolled.  I wondered what had happened to the wife and children of the man who was in the carriage with me.

At Aire-sur-Lys there were groups of women and children who, like so many others in those days, had abandoned their houses and left all they had in the world save a few bundles of clothes and baskets of food.  I asked them what they would do when the food was finished.

“There will always be a little charity, m’sieur,” said one woman, “and at least my children are safe.”

After the first terror of the invasion those women were calm and showed astounding courage and resignation.

It was more than pitiful to see the refugees on the roads from Hazebrouck.  There was a constant stream of them in those two cross-currents, and they came driving slowly along in bakers’ carts and butchers’ carts, with covered hoods, in farm carts loaded up with several families or trudging along with perambulators and wheelbarrows.  The women were weary.  Many of them had babies in their arms.  The elder children held on to their mother’s skirts or tramped along together, hand in hand.  But there was no trace of tears.  I heard no wailing cry.  Some of them seemed utterly indifferent to this retreat from home.  They had gone beyond the need of tears.

From one of these women, a lady named Mme. Duterque, who had left Arras with a small boy and girl, I heard the story of her experiences in the bombarded town.  There were hundreds of women who had similar stories, but this one is typical enough of all those individual experiences of women who quite suddenly, and almost without warning, found themselves victims of the Invasion.

She was in her dressing-room in one of the old houses of the Grande Place in Arras, when at half-past nine in the morning the first shell burst over the town very close to her own dwelling-place.  For days there had been distant firing on the heights round Arras, but now this shell came with a different, closer, more terrible sound.

“It seemed to annihilate me for a moment,” said Mme. Duterque.  “It stunned all my senses with a frightful shock.  A few moments later I recovered myself and thought anxiously of my little girl who had gone to school as usual a few streets away.  I was overjoyed when she came trotting home, quite unafraid, although by this time the shells were falling in various parts of the town.”