I remember the mobilisation in Paris on the day before war was
declared, and that day. The French people had a different, sharper,
more immediate fear. The frontier was in danger. France herself was
menaced by the greatest army in the world. In one day, two days, all
her life would be at stake. There was a sense of stupefaction among the
common people. They too had been taken by surprise by the suddenness
of the challenge. And they knew better than the English what war
meant in horror and agony. In those crowds among whom I went there
were many who remembered 1870—that nightmare of terror and shame and
tears. There was no cheering, as when fifty years before the people
in Paris had shouted _á Berlin_! in an ecstasy of war fever. In Paris
there was the hush of souls who looked into the face of great death.
In the streets men were parting from their women—for the last time.
Some wept, not many, after the kiss of eternity. Emotion strangled
one’s heart. In those days France seemed to me divine in courage, in
sacrifice, in suffering. Anarchists, revolutionists, the scum of the
underworld, the poor drabs, were cleansed of all evil, for a time,
by love and passion—for France. They themselves did not matter. They
held their lives as nothing so that France might live. The Pacifists
said: “This is a war to end war.” The Socialists said: “This is a
war against militarism.” The old women said: “Our sons will die, but
France will be saved.” The young women said: “We give our lovers to
France.” From the fields, the workshops and the factories, the manhood
of France, quicker than in England, came down to the railways to join
their depôts, and for hundreds of miles on the first night of war, in
a train taking the first troops to the eastern frontier, I heard on
the warm breeze the “Marseillaise,” the song of Liberty and France,
and the tramp of marching men, and the rattle of gun waggons; and I
felt the spirit of an heroic people like a physical vibration about me.
After that come a thousand memories, strangely distant now, like an old
dream, of roads black with fugitive people, retreating from the red
flame of war; of French and Belgian towns under the first shell-fire,
until they fell into flame and ruin; of wounded men, clotted with
mud and blood, very quiet, on dirty stretchers, lying in rows under
brown blankets, on railway platforms, in improvised hospitals, piled
in farm carts, huddled under broken walls, in endless caravans of
ambulances; the reek of blood, disinfectants, death; troops on the
march, guns going forward, the French cavalry riding on saddle-galled
horses, machine-guns in cornfields; troop trains; stations crowded
with regiments; fields strewn with dead; women wheeling perambulators
with babies and household goods, boys pushing old men along in
wheelbarrows, farmcarts laden with children, furniture, grandmothers;
the cry reiterated of “_Sales Boches!_”; the words “_C’est la guerre!_”
repeated as an endless reason for infinite resignation to all this
agony, and terror of civilian folk trapped in chaos; the phantasmagoria
of war in modern civilisation; and always the courage of women, the
valour of men, the immortal spirit of France rising above the torture
of its soul and body, while the enemy thrust closer to its heart. In
those days—ten years ago—an Englishman in France dedicated his heart to
these people....