Part 32

This, then, was the Germans' chance; it was for this that they had fought their way westward and southward through incessant battlefields from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens and down to Creil and Compiegne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for deathpits. The prize of Paris, Paris the great and beautiful, seemed to be within their grasp.

It was their intention to smash their way into it by this western entry and then to skin it alive. Holding this city at ransom, it was their idea to force France to her knees under threat of making a vast and desolate ruin of all those palaces and churches and noble buildings in which the soul of French history is enshrined.

They might have done it but for one thing which has upset all the cold-blooded calculations of their staff, that thing which perhaps I may be pardoned for calling the miracle. They might have done it, I think, last Wednesday and Thursday, even perhaps as late as last Friday.

I am not saying these things from rumor and hearsay, I am writing from the evidence of my own eyes after traveling several hundreds of miles in France during the last four days along the main strategical lines, grim sentinels guarding the last barriers to that approaching death which is sweeping on its way through France to the rich harvest of Paris, which it was eager to destroy.

There was only one thing to do to escape from the menace of this death. By all the ways open, by any way, the population of Paris emptied itself like rushing rivers of humanity along all the lines which promised anything like safety.

Only those stayed behind to whom life means very little away from Paris and who if death came desired to die in the city of their life.

Again I write from what I saw and to tell the honest truth from what I suffered, for the fatigue of this hunting for facts behind the screen of war is exhausting to all but one's moral strength, and even to that.

I found myself in the midst of a new and extraordinary activity of the French and English Armies. Regiments were being rushed up to the centre of the allied forces toward Creil, Montdidier, and Noyon. That was before last Tuesday, when the English troops [Transcriber: original 'toops'] were fighting hard at Creil.

This great movement continued for several days, putting to a severe test the French railway system, which is so wonderfully organized that it achieved this mighty transportation of troops with clockwork regularity. Working to a time table dictated by some great brain which in Headquarters Staff of the French Army, calculated with perfect precision the conditions of a network of lines on which troop trains might be run to a given point. It was an immense victory of organization, and a movement which heartened one observer at least to believe that the German deathblow would again be averted.

I saw regiment after regiment entraining. Men from the Southern Provinces, speaking the patois of the South; men from the Eastern Departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war, at Chalons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre of France, in garrisons along the Loire. They were all in splendid spirits and utterly undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance.

"It is nothing, my little one," said a dirty, unshaved gentleman with the laughing eyes of a D'Artagnan; "we shall bite their heads off. These brutal bosches are going to put themselves in a guetapens, a veritable deathtrap. We shall have them at last."

Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the Vosges. The youngest of them had bristling beards, their blue coats with turned-back flaps were war worn and flanked with the dust of long marches; their red trousers were sloppy and stained, but they had not forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their spirits was a joy to see.

They are very proud, these French soldiers, of fighting side by side with their old foes. The English now, after long centuries of strife, from Edward, the Black Prince, to Wellington, are their brothers-in-arms upon the battlefields, and because I am English they offered me their cigarettes and made me one of them. But I realized even then that the individual is of no account in this inhuman business of war.

It is only masses of men that matter, moved by common obedience at the dictation of mysterious far-off powers, and I thanked Heaven that masses of men were on the move rapidly in vast numbers and in the right direction to support the French lines which had fallen back from Amiens a few hours before I left that town, and whom I had followed in their retirement, back and back, with the English always strengthening their left, but retiring with them almost to the outskirts of Paris itself.

Only this could save Paris--the rapid strengthening of the allied front by enormous reserves strong enough to hold back the arrow-shaped battering ram of the enemy's main army.

Undoubtedly the French Headquarters Staff was working heroically and with fine intelligence to save the situation at the very gates of Paris. The country was being swept absolutely clean of troops in all parts of France, where they had been waiting as reserves.

It was astounding to me to see, after those three days of rushing troop trains and of crowded stations not large enough to contain the regiments, how on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday last an air of profound solitude and peace had taken possession of all these routes.

In my long journey through and about France and circling round Paris I found myself wondering sometimes whether all this war had not been a dreadful illusion without reality, and a transformation had taken place, startling in its change, from military turmoil to rural peace.

Dijon was emptied of its troops. The road to Chalons was deserted by all but fugitives. The great armed camp at Chalons itself had been cleared out except for a small garrison. The troops at Tours had gone northward to the French centre. All our English reserves had been rushed up to the front from Havre and Rouen.

There was only one deduction to be drawn from this great, swift movement--the French and English lines had been supported by every available battalion to save Paris from its menace of destruction, to meet the weight of the enemy's metal by a force strong enough to resist its mighty mass.

It was still possible that the Germans might be smashed on their left wing, hurled back to the west between Paris and the sea, and cut off from their line of communications. It was undoubtedly this impending peril which scared the enemy's Headquarters Staff and upset all its calculations. They had not anticipated the rapidity of the supporting movement of the allied armies, and at the very gates of Paris they saw themselves balked of their prize, the greatest prize of the war, by the necessity of changing front.

To do them justice, they realized instantly the new order of things, and with quick and marvelous decision did not hesitate to alter the direction of their main force. Instead of proceeding to the west of Paris they swung round steadily to the southeast in order to keep their armies away from the enveloping movement of the French and English and drive their famous wedge-like formation southward for the purpose of dividing the allied forces of the west from the French Army of the East. The miraculous had happened, and Paris, for a little time at least, is unmolested.

That brings me back to the fighting at Creil and Compiegne, which preceded from last Tuesday until two days later.

The guns were at work at midnight on Tuesday when I passed the English Headquarters. This battle had only one purpose so far as the Germans were concerned. It was to keep our British soldiers busy, as well as to hold the front of the French allies on our right, while their debordant movements took place behind this fighting screen.

Once again, as throughout the war, they showed their immense superiority in mitrailleuses, which gives them marvelous mobility and a very deadly advantage. They masked these quick-firers with great skill until they had drawn on the English and French infantry and then spilled lead into their ranks. Once again, also the French were too impetuous, as they have always been, and as they still are, in spite of Gen. Joffre's severe rebuke.

Careless of quick-firers, which experience should have taught them were masked behind the enemy's advance posts, they charged with the bayonet, and suffered needlessly heavy losses. One can only admire the gallantry of men who dare to charge on foot against the enemy's mounted men and who actually put a squadron of them to flight, but one must say again: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre."

There have been many incidents of heroism in these last days of fighting. It is, for instance, immensely characteristic of the French spirit that an infantry battalion, having put to flight a detachment of German outposts in the forest of Compiegne, calmly sat down to have a picnic in the woods until, as they sat over their hot soup, laughing at their exploit, they were attacked by a new force and cut to pieces.

But let me describe the new significance of the main German advance. Their right army has struck down to the southeast of Paris, through Chateau Thiery to La Ferte-sur-Jouarre and beyond. Their centre army is coming hard down from Troyes, in the Department of the Aube, and the army of the left has forced the French to evacuate Rheims and fall back in a southwesterly direction.