enthusiasm for the red glory of war.  And when we crossed the Dutch border that afternoon and came on a village street full of Belgian soldiers cut off and forced to cross the line, to be interned here, presumably until the war was over, one could not mourn very deeply their lost chances of martial glory as they unslung their rifles and turned them over to the good-natured Dutch guard.  They had held back that avalanche long enough, these Belgians, and one felt as one would to see lost children get home again or some one dragged from under the wheels.

Chapter V

Paris Again—­And Bordeaux:  Journal of a Flight from a London Fogs

These notes began in a London fog and ended in the south of France.  I had hoped, on reaching Calais, to work in toward the fighting along the Yser, but, finding it impossible, decided to turn about and travel away from the front instead of toward it—­down to see Bordeaux while it was still the temporary capital, and to see what life might be like in the French provincial towns in war time.

It was not, so the young woman at the hotel desk in London said, what you would call a fog, because she could still see the porter at the street-door—­yet day after day the same rain, smoky mist, and unbroken gloom.

One breakfasted and tramped the streets by lamplight, as if there were no such thing as sun—–­recalled vaguely a world in which it used to be—­ woods with the leaves turning, New York on a bright autumn morning, enchanted tropical dawns.

Through this viscous envelope—­a sort of fungi thrown off by it—­ newspapers kept appearing—­slaughter and more slaughter, hatred, the hunt for spies, more hysterical and shrill.  One looked for fairness almost as for the sun, and, merely by blackguarding long enough men who could not answer back and, after all, were flinging their lives away bravely over there in France, one ended by giving them the very qualities they were denied.

They faded out as one picture on a stereopticon screen fades into another—­even as one read “Huns” for the thousandth time the Huns turned into kindly burghers smoking pipes and singing songs.  In the same way the England of tradition—­Shakespeare, Dickens, Meredith, jolly old rumbling London, rides ’cross country, rows on the river—­faded into this nightmare of hate and smoky lamplight.  The psychology was very simple, but too much, it seems, for censors and even editors.  And, unfortunately, at a time like this not the light-hearted, sportsmanlike fighting men at the front, nor sober people left behind in homes, but newspapers are likely to be an outsider’s most constant companions.