My Year of the War | Page 7

at stake, with values reckoned in lives, and this
makes for equality.
"It's clear that we have had a bad knock. Why deny it?" he said. Then
he added quietly, after a pause: "This is a personal call for me. I'm
going to enlist."

England's answer to that "bad knock" was out of her experience. She
had never won at first, but she had always won in the end; she had won
the last battle. The next day's news was worse and the next day's still
worse. The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by forced
marches. Paris might fall--no matter! Though the French army were
shattered, one heard Englishmen say that the British would create an
army to wrest victory from defeat. The spirit of this was fine, but one
realized the enormity of the task; should the mighty German machine
crush the French machine, the Allies had lost. To say so then was
heresy, when the world was inclined to think poorly of the French army
and saw Russian numbers as irresistible.
The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be decided.
My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the second,
farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south, to Dieppe.
Where next? To Havre! Events were moving with the speed which had
been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown into battle by
the quick march of the railroad trains.
Every event was hidden under the "fog of war," then a current
expression--meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their brief
lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the lines.
The marvel was that any but troop trains should run. All night in that
third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris! Tired and preoccupied
passengers; everyone's heart heavy; everyone's soul wrenched;
everyone prepared for the worst! You cared for no other man's views;
the one thing you wanted was no bad news. France had known that
when the war came it would be to the death. From the first no
Frenchman could have had any illusions. England had not realized yet
that her fate was with the soldiers of France, or France that her fate and
all the world's was with the British fleet.
An Italian in our compartment would talk, however, and he would keep
the topic down to red trousers, and to the red trousers of a French
Territorial opposite, with an index finger when his gesticulatory
knowledge of the French language, which was excellent, came to the
rescue of his verbal knowledge, which was poor. The Frenchman

agreed that red trousers were a mistake, but pointed to the blue
covering which he had for his cap--which made it all right. The Italian
insisted on keeping to the trousers. He talked red trousers till the
Frenchman got out at his station, and then turned to me to confirm his
views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After all,
he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to write
on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen to this
sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men lay dead
and wounded from that day's fight on the soil of France. Red trousers
were responsible for the death of a lot of those men.
Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvest
lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the
work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to an hotel
with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking
busily in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the
clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to
door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre's request that
everyone should go on with his day's work.
"They're done!" said an American in the foyer. "The French cannot
stand up against the Germans--anybody could see that! It's too bad, but
the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the next
day."
I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all
one's belief in the French army and in the real character of the French
people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of democracy; it
meant disaster to all one's precepts; a personal disaster.
"Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the
power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not
had their battle yet!" I said.
And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with
lots of fight left in it.

Ill Paris Waits

It was then that people were speaking