Chapter I: The Outbreak. In and out of Paris

On Tuesday, 28th of July, I returned from the Alps; the weather conditions had been arctic and the climbing more than usually exciting. During a bathe in the Lake of Geneva, which has become the customary end of the climbing season, I remember saying to my companion, "Well, this is the end of all sensation for the year. Now for the usual dull winter's work."

On Thursday I volunteered to go with the Servian Army as War Correspondent for the _Daily News_, but the European conflagration was already too imminent. On Sunday, it was arranged that I should go to Paris to join the French Army.

The journey started normally. But at Newhaven it was startling to see three English travellers turn and rush off the boat at the last minute. It was the first and unforgettable sign of the break-up in our order of life. To take a ticket and start a journey no longer meant the inevitable procession to its end. We were beginning the life of the unexpected; when event and interruption was to take the place of the decent ordering of hours by convention and system.

On the boat were only men; older men called up to the colours. Most of them were fathers of families. One man sat in tears over a photograph of his five children spread out before him. Some had lived all their lives in England. "Well, you're an Englishman, at any rate," said the steward to an obvious cockney. But he was French, though he could scarcely speak it. A very old priest was returning, after twenty years, to "die among his soldier children" in a French frontier village--"or perhaps my grand-children," he corrected, with a faint smile.

As we neared Calais the cloud began to pass. The men clustered and spoke together: a few started singing. When I had crossed a few days before, the quay had been lined with the usual cheering children, and a few condescending tourists had waved back. Now there was a line of soldiers in the same place. Our passengers rushed to the side and cheered them. A number of French cruisers guarded the entrance. It was the first real proof that we were passing into the facts of war. The odd nightmare feeling of those few first days, that witnessed the collapse of the structure of civilisation upon which our lives had hitherto rested, intensified. The war was true after all; not merely a terrible darkness of sensation into which we kept waking up, with a shrinking discomfort, whenever our attention came back from reading some book or following some ordinary chain of thought.

At Calais there had been no regular train traffic for three days. A number of travellers who had got as far as Calais on previous days decided to return by our boat to England. The porters stood round vaguely, with the distracted strained look that we learned to associate later with the presence of the war atmosphere. I discovered to my surprise a train waiting in the station with steam up:--it was "Lord Kitchener's Special," prepared to carry him on his way to Egypt. But Lord Kitchener at the last moment had not come, for reasons that have since proved amply sufficient. By various persuasive arguments we at last convinced the undecided station-master that as the line had been cleared the express might run through; and we reached Paris in four hours; the "last" unofficial express during the war.

The Gare du Nord was empty of porters; but the long lines of platform were piled ten feet high down the centre with enormous trunks--the abandoned luggage of escaping tourists.

Outside the station the approaches were barred by barriers, where dragoons demanded passes from every foot passenger. Troops poured past, starting for their different centres of concentration. The suburban traffic had ceased. The streets were full of people kept in the town against their will by the demands of the mobilisation.

Paris had not yet settled down. It was seething in those first three days of panic that seemed throughout Europe to follow the declaration of war. More an atmospheric feeling than a state with definite symptoms. People, for these days, seemed to be moving and speaking semi-consciously, with the nervous suggestion in their faces that they expected something novel and shocking to happen at any second. The supposed German shops and houses were being wrecked and looted. Every now and then there was a hurried rush of feet through the street, as some suspect was hunted or maltreated. The spy-hunting mania seems to have been a universal infection during this time. The disorderly elements in the big towns got the upper hand for the moment and the cold-blooded brutality of these silent man-hunts was to me infinitely more shocking than the sight and sound of the more terrible destruction on the battlefields. It was the first growl of the beast that we had let loose, the savage animal in man waking for our purposes of war. Under my window was a great courtyard, in which hundreds of German and Austrian men, women and children were confined for their protection. They had to sleep on the stones in the open air; and it was a pitiable thing, while the crowds outside the gate were execrating and hustling those who were thrust in to join them, to hear them singing French songs and cheering for France. Most of them were French by education and sympathy, and only German by extraction.

The apache element, which had been encouraged by the thinning out of the Gendarmerie for military service to make patriotism the cover for convenient looting and brutality, was soon brought into order. Cavalry pickets patrolled the streets in the evening; a curious sight, their horses trampling on the pavement of the Rue de la Paix. The worst haunts were raided; many hundreds were arrested, and the police in large motor wagons ran through deserted quarters, stopping and pouncing in batches upon suspected passers-by. The civil hand had released its hold, and it was a day or two before the new military administration could get a firm grip. Government offices were in a not unnatural state of confusion--they had been weakened by the withdrawal of a large proportion of their effective staff, at the same moment that they became responsible for an enormous mass of novel duty. The civilian, under military government, found himself of a sudden unable to move or exist without official permits. The whole social structure had to be reorganised, and the offices were crowded with jostling individuals asking for permissions and explanations which the over-worked officials were unable to supply. One of the most painful memories of the war was the sight of refined-looking Austrians and Germans, men and women, artists and writers, with the puzzled hunted expression of people in a nightmare, forced to appeal in public to hurrying footmen and office boys for some indulgence that might allow them to continue to earn their living.

The guiding principle of most public offices at this time, not only in Paris, seemed to be that of sending people backward and forward until their endurance should wear out. With what should happen to them in case they did not comply with all the new regulations the military outlook was not concerned. Every effort was to be concentrated on the preparation for war. The civilian in such an atmosphere has no further rights. If we permit, as nations, the whole civilised order of existence to be pitched into a whirlpool of primitive passions, we must expect to have to scuffle personally for our life-belts.

On the third day of my stay in Paris the situation was indescribably relieved by the declaration of war between England and Germany. The rush on the banks stopped. Prices fell. Money became easier, and the crowd of British and other tourists, sitting on their boxes in nervous lines before the Consulates, diminished. The growing hostility of the Parisians to ourselves disappeared. The organization in the responsible offices, in so far as the public was concerned, began to assume some order.

Night and day the regiments passed through and round the city. The mobilisation was rapid and extremely orderly. There was no apparent hitch. We became confident that the prophecies that France would be found unprepared would be proved totally wrong. Gradually the requisitioned cabs and trams began to reappear in the streets. The women quietly stepped into the men's places as ticket-collectors, etc. With reduced numbers and closed shops, a graver population took up its ordinary life.

It was very soon apparent that no official correspondents were to be allowed with the French or British forces. A large proportion of the remaining officials, not to say ourselves, could have been saved infinite bother if the intention had been declared from the first. After a week spent without profit in ante-chambers and bureaus, I decided to get through to Belgium, where there seemed to be better possibility of approaching actual events. Chance helped me to secure a more picturesque fashion of return than I could have hoped for.

Saturday, August 10th.

I am just back from the first, and "probably the last," visit that a civilian will be able to pay to the French frontier until the situation has considerably developed.

To have to wait a day in a queue to obtain a permit to leave, another to secure a ticket, and even a third to confirm it by getting a definite seat on a numbered train, can discourage the most patient. The miracle of deliverance, however, took place; and it was brought about by the agency of a chance meeting with a genial chauffeur. There followed an introduction to his employers, a party of Belgian officers returning to their own army, and an amiable invitation to evade some of the weariness of the irregular train journey by taking a lift.

That this was extended beyond all limits contemplated by military regulations must be attributed to a reluctance to turn out on a dark, wet night, in unknown districts, one of a nation whose intervention, as I was assured, has contributed much to the magnificent spirit with which the Belgian troops have supported the first rush of the "invincible machine."

We left Paris with the Boulevards almost as crowded as ever, but with half the colour and light gone, and a note of unusual gravity in the aspect and talk of the moving stream.

Out through the long, dark suburbs, with the last signal, the flare of the searchlight from the Eiffel Tower, blinking its messages across the clouds high above our heads in front. In the first two miles we were stopped half-a-dozen times; business-like question and answer in quick, suppressed voices. Then the checks decreased as we ran out into the dark fields, though the flash of light upon arms, the challenge and halt came still at bridge and corner. The 'word of the day' passed us at only reduced pace through the larger pickets, but the less well-informed solitary sentry had to be more fully satisfied; and the more, the further from Paris.

Then longer and longer intervals of tremendous racing, unchecked; for the car drove at full speed, and there is no peace traffic! The light of the Eiffel Tower disappeared behind, but there was still the consciousness, in the most remote darkness, that above us darted ceaselessly the continuous stream of wireless messages linking the brain of the army in the little room in unseen Paris with every movement of the vast protecting arms that already lie outstretched to guard France. Through Senlis, Compiègne, St. Quentin, and, at last, Cambrai. It was only possible to calculate the probable towns by the intervals of time, for in each case we were turned off on to side circuits.

When I had passed south to Paris a few days before, on a more westerly line, the country had still seemed inhabited, though by a mixed race: crowds of little red and blue soldiers resting, marching, crammed in troop trains, and knots of men and women at the village corners, or staring at the gates of the huge deserted factories.

Now it seemed an empty land. All the life had passed east into the great war cloud. Only now and again the flash of the lamp on a cluster of boys and older men, sitting or lying by the road; the non-combatants of the villages from the war region tramping west, with blue check bundles tied on the handles of their reaping hooks, to earn what they could, for the later repair of their losses, by helping to harvest. Need for it, too, as the sight of the immense fields of grain, unreaped or half reaped, yellowing the lonely fields of the uninhabited country, suggest ruin to the traveller passing in the train.

Before Cambrai we passed under a thicker darkness of cloud, and met a torrent of rain that for the rest of the night and morning hid everything but the glint of the lamps on falling drops or the more vivid gleam of fixed bayonets.

As we neared the frontier the country seemed to become populous again. The cottages had lights; lights in the fields and through the trees. Only, as we passed, the strangeness increased, for the population had come from a different planet. Quiet cottages, with the glow of uniforms through the wet panes, fields with a few tireless peasant women, helped by good-humoured soldiers, using even the darkness for a desperate effort to get in the forsaken crops. The sight of arms and wagons seemed all the less fitting in the quiet villages because there was no suggestion of war.

One picture stands out vividly; the glare of the lights through the rain on a sentry motionless on guard, while a dozen peasant women, tired doubtless from the day's reaping, slept in his charge, lying under the ridge of the field where they had been working.

Beyond Cambrai I was not at liberty to note our direction or record any details--a natural condition.

In fact, there would be little to record; for the night was a continuance of sounds, of lights, of moving unseen men and horses; and of sudden challenges, coming out of the darkness through the rush of rain. Only I may add that in one village our welcome was marked by a different French intonation as the men gathered round us, and a Belgian advance patrol exchanged jokes with my companions.

Our route from Cambrai, as a matter of fact, took us to Valenciennes, where the Belgian officers left me, hurrying to Maubeuge, while I returned by car to Douai.

In the grey of the morning I emerged, passing north of Douai, and now without my companions. As we raced west, still through rain, we passed again into deserted countries. The great machine had done its work. The mobilisation was complete. The dotted sentries, gradually changing from the smart field soldier to the paternal reservist squeezed into a uniform--or partial uniform, seemed the only jetsam of the coloured turmoil of the early week.

The crawling railway, the American ladies complaining of the slow trains and closed buffets, brought us back to ordinary life. Officials, struggling to make us take their passports and their war-regulations seriously, failed to revive any reality of impression.

The war frontier, in rain and darkness, was drifting back into the vague excitement of newspaper reports.

The separation by nationalities was in full progress. France was being cleared of all strangers. The consuls, for reasons not clear, were advising all British residents to return to England at once. The chief sufferers were the children, boys at school in France, children left for visits or cures with French families or in boarding houses. Before I reached Folkestone there must have been at least fifteen such small strays who had had to be adopted and looked after during the succeeding stages of the journey.