But on all sides, from the French officers, there is immense praise for the magnificent conduct of our troops, and in spite of all alarmist statements I am convinced from what I have heard that they have retired intact, keeping their lines together, and preventing their divisions from being broken and cut off.
The list of casualties must be very great, but if I can believe the evidence of my own eyes in such towns as Rouen, where the Red Cross hospitals are concentrated, they are not heavy enough to suggest anything like a great and irretrievable disaster.
DIEPPE, Sept. 3.--Let me describe briefly the facts which I have learned of in the last five days. When I escaped from Amiens, before the tunnel was broken up, and the Germans entered into possession of the town on Aug. 28, the front of the allied armies was in a crescent from Abbeville, south of Amiens on the wooded heights, and thence in an irregular line to south of Mezieres. The British forces, under Sir John French, were at the left of the centre, supporting the heavy thrust-forward of the main German advance, while the right was commanded by Gen. Pau.
On Sunday afternoon fighting was resumed along the whole line. The German vanguard had by this time been supported by a fresh army corps, which had been brought from Belgium. At least 1,000,000 men were on the move, pressing upon the allied forces with a ferocity of attack which has never before been equaled. Their cavalry swept across a great tract of country, squadron by squadron, like the mounted hordes of Attila, but armed with the dreadful weapons of modern warfare. Their artillery was in enormous numbers, and their columns advanced under cover of it, not like an army, but rather like a moving nation--I do not think, however, with equal pressure at all parts of the line. It formed itself into a battering ram with a pointed end, and this point was thrust at the heart of the English wing.
It was impossible to resist this onslaught. If the British forces had stood against it they would have been crushed and broken. Our gunners were magnificent, and shelled the advancing German columns so that the dead lay heaped up along the way which was leading down to Paris; but as one of them told me: "It made no manner of difference; as soon as we had smashed one lot another followed, column after column, and by sheer weight of numbers we could do nothing to check them."
After this the British forces fell back, fighting all the time. The line of the Allies was now in the shape of a V, the Germans thrusting their main attack deep into the angle.
This position remained the same until Monday, or, rather, had completed itself by that date, the retirement of the troops being maintained with masterly skill and without any undue haste.
Meanwhile Gen. Pau was sustaining a terrific attack on the French centre by the German left centre, which culminated on (date omitted).
The River Oise, which runs between beautiful meadows, was choked with corpses and red with blood.
From an eyewitness of this great battle, an officer of an infantry regiment, who escaped with a slight wound, I learned that the German onslaught had been repelled by a series of brilliant bayonet and cavalry charges.
"The Germans," he said, "had the elite of their army engaged against us, including the Tenth Army Corps and the Imperial Guard, but the heroism of our troops was sublime. Every man knew that the safety of France depended upon him and was ready to sacrifice his life, if need be, with joyful enthusiasm. They not only resisted the enemy's attack but took the offensive, and, in spite of their overpowering numbers, gave them tremendous punishment. They had to recoil before our guns, which swept their ranks, and their columns were broken and routed.
"Hundreds of them were bayoneted, and hundreds were hurled into the river. The whole field of battle was outlined by dead and dying men whom they had to abandon. Certainly their losses were enormous, and I felt that the German retreat was in full swing and that we could claim a real victory for the time being."
Nevertheless the inevitable happened, owing to the vast reserves of the enemy, who brought up four divisions, and Gen. Pau was compelled to give ground.
On Tuesday German skirmishers with light artillery were coming southward, and the sound of their field guns greeted my ears in that town which I shall always remember with unpleasant recollections in spite of its Old World beauty and the loveliness of the scene in which it is set. It seemed to me that this was the right place to be in order to get into touch with the French Army on the way to the capital. As a matter of fact, it was the wrong place from all points of view; it was nothing less than a deathtrap, and it was by a thousand-to-one chance that I succeeded in escaping quite a nasty kind of fate.
I might have suspected that something was wrong with the place by the strange look on the face of a friendly French peasant, whom I met. He had described to me in a very vivid way the disposition of the French troops on the neighboring hills. Down the road came suddenly parties of peasants with fear in their eyes. Some of them were in farm carts and put their horses to a stumbling gallop.
Women with blanched faces, carrying children in their arms, trudged along the dusty highway, and it was clear that these people were afraid of something behind them. There were not many of them, and when they had passed the countryside was strangely and uncannily quiet. There was only the sound of singing birds above fields which were flooded with the golden light of the setting sun.
Then I came into the town. An intense silence brooded there among the narrow little streets below the old Norman church--a white jewel on the rising ground beyond. Almost every house was shuttered with blind eyes; but here and there I looked through an open window into deserted rooms.
No human face returned my gaze. It was an abandoned town, emptied of all its people, who had fled with fear in their eyes, like those peasants along the roadway.
But presently I saw a human form; it was the figure of a French dragoon with his carbine slung behind his back. He was stopping by the side of a number of gunpowder bags. A little further away were little groups of soldiers at work by two bridges, one over a stream and one over a road.
They were working very calmly, and I could see what they were doing; they were mining bridges to blow them up at a given signal.
As I went further I saw that the streets were strewn with broken bottles and littered with wire entanglements, very artfully and carefully made.
It was a queer experience. It was obvious that there was very grim business being done, and that the soldiers were waiting for something to happen. At the railway station I quickly learned the truth; the Germans were only a few miles away, in great force. At any moment they might come down, smashing everything in their way and killing every human being along that road.
The station master, a brave old type, and one or two porters had determined to stay on to the last. "We are here," he said, as though the Germans would have to reckon with him; but he was emphatic in his request for me to leave at once if another train could be got away, which was very uncertain. As a matter of fact, after a bad quarter of an hour I was put on the last train to escape from this threatened town, and left it with the sound of German guns in my ears, followed by a dull explosion when the bridge behind me was blown up.
My train, in which there were only four other men, skirted the German army, and by a twist in the line almost ran into the enemy's country, but we rushed through the night, and the engine driver laughed and put his oily hand up to salute when I stepped out to the platform of an unknown station. "The Germans won't get us, after all," he said. It was a little risky, all the same.
The station was crowded with French soldiers, and they were soon telling me their experience of the hard fighting in which they had been engaged.
They were dirty, unshaven, dusty from head to foot, scorched by the August sun, in tattered uniforms and broken boots; but they were beautiful men for all their dirt, and the laughing courage, quiet confidence, and unbragging simplicity with which they assured me that the Germans would soon be caught in a death trap and sent to their destruction filled me with admiration which I cannot express in words.
All the odds were against them; they had fought the hardest of all actions--the retirement from the fighting line--but they had absolute faith in the ultimate success of their allied arms.
I managed to get to Paris. It was in the middle of the night, but extraordinary scenes were taking place. It had become known during the day that Paris was no longer the seat of the Government, which has moved to Bordeaux. The Parisians had had notice of four days in which to destroy their houses within the zone of fortifications, and, to add to the cold fear occasioned by this news, aeroplanes had dropped bombs upon the Gare de l'Est that afternoon.
There was a rush last night to get away from the capital, and the railway stations were great camps of fugitives, in which the richest and poorest citizens were mingled with their women and children. But the tragedy deepened when it was heard that most of the lines to the east had been cut, and that the only line remaining open to Dieppe would probably be destroyed during the next few hours. A great wail of grief arose from the crowds, and the misery of these people was pitiful.
Among them were groups of soldiers of many regiments. Many of them were wounded and lay on stretchers on the floor among crying babies and weary-eyed women. They had been beaten and were done for until the end of the war. But, alone among the panic-stricken crowd--panic-stricken, yet not noisy or hysterical, but very quiet and restrained for the most part--the soldiers were cheerful, and even gay.
Among them were some British troops, and I had a talk with them. They had been fighting for ten days without cessation, and their story is typical of the way in which all our troops held themselves.
"We had been fighting night and day," said a Sergeant. "For the whole of that time the only rest from fighting was when we were marching and retiring." He spoke of the German Army as an avalanche of armed men.
"You can't mow that down," he said. "We kill them and kill them, and still they come on. They seem to have an inexhaustible supply of fresh troops. Directly we check them in one attack a fresh attack is developed. It is impossible to oppose such a mass of men with any success."
This splendid fellow, who was severely wounded, was still so much master of himself, so supreme in his common sense, that he was able to get the right perspective about the general situation.
"It is not right to say we have met with disaster," he said. "We have to expect that nowadays. Besides, what if a battalion was cut up? That did not mean defeat. While one regiment suffered, another got off lightly"; and by the words of that Sergeant the public may learn to see the truth of what has happened. I can add my own evidence to his. All along the lines I have spoken to officers and men, and the actual truth is that the British Army is still unbroken, having retired in perfect order to good positions--the most marvelous feat ever accomplished in modern warfare.
From Paris I went by the last train again which has got through to Dieppe. Lately I seem to have become an expert in catching the last train. It was only a branch line which struggles in an erratic way through the west of France, and the going was long and painful, because at every wayside station the carriages were besieged by people trying to escape. They were very patient and very brave. Even when they found that it was impossible to get one more human being on or one more package into the already crowded train they turned away in quiet grief, and when women wept over their babies it was silently and without abandonment to despair. The women of France are brave, God knows. I have seen their courage during the past ten days--gallantry surpassing that of the men, because of their own children in their arms without shelter, food, or safety in this terrible flight from the advancing enemy.
Enormous herds of cattle were being driven into Paris. For miles the roads were thronged with them; and down other roads away from Paris families were trekking to far fields with their household goods piled into bullock carts, pony carts, and wheelbarrows.
Two batteries of artillery were stationed by the line, and a regiment of infantry was hiding in the hollows of the grassy slopes. Their outposts were scanning the horizon, and it was obvious that the Germans were expected at this point in order to cut the last way of escape from the capital.
One of the enemy's aeroplanes flew above our heads, circled around, and then disappeared. It dropped no bombs and was satisfied with its reconnoissance. The whistle of the train shrieked out, and there was a cheer from the French gunners as we went on our way to safety, leaving them behind at the post of peril.
ST. PIERRE DU VAUVRAY, Sept. 6.--England received a hint yesterday as to a change in the German campaign, but only those who have been, as I have, into the very heart of this monstrous horror of war, seeing the flight of hundreds of thousands of people before an overwhelming enemy and following the lines of the allied armies in their steady retirement before an apparently irresistible advance, may realize even dimly the meaning of the amazing transformation that has happened during the last few days.
For when I wrote my last dispatch from Arques-la-Bataille, after my adventures along the French and English lines, it seemed as inevitable as the rising of next day's sun that the Germans should enter Paris on the very day when I wrote my dispatch. Still not a single shot has come crashing upon the French fortifications.
At least a million men--that is no exaggeration of a light pen, but the sober and actual truth--were advancing steadily upon the capital last Tuesday. They were close to Beauvais when I escaped from what was then a death-trap. They were fighting our British troops at Creil when I came to that town. Upon the following days they were holding our men in the Forest of Compiegne. They had been as near to Paris as Senlis, almost within gunshot of the outer forts.
"Nothing seems to stop them," said many soldiers with whom I spoke. "We kill them and kill them, but they come on."
The situation seemed to me almost ready for the supreme tragedy--the capture or destruction of Paris. The northwest of France lay very open to the enemy, abandoned as far south as Abbeville and Amiens, too lightly held by a mixed army corps of French and Algerian troops with their headquarters at Aumale.
Here was an easy way to Paris.
Always obsessed with the idea that the Germans must come from the east, the almost fatal error of this war, the French had girdled Paris with almost impenetrable forts on the east side, from those of Ecouen and Montmorency, by the far-flung forts of Chelles and Champigny, to those of Susy and Villeneuve, on the outer lines of the triple cordon; but on the west side, between Pontoise and Versailles, the defenses of Paris were weak. I say "were," because during the last three days thousands of men have been digging trenches and throwing up ramparts. Only the snakelike Seine, twining into Pegoud loop, forms a natural defense to the western approach to the city, none too secure against men who have crossed many rivers in their desperate assaults.
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.