The first place I will take you to is Evian, because here you see the tragedy and need of France as embodied in individuals.  Evian-les-Bains is on Lake Geneva, looking out across the water to Switzerland.  It is the first point of call across the French frontier for the repatries returning from their German bondage.  When the Boche first swept down on the northern provinces he pushed the French civilian population behind him.  He has since kept them working for him as serfs, labouring in the captured coal-mines, digging his various lines of defences, setting up wire-entanglements, etc.  Apart from the testimony of repatriated French civilians, I myself have seen messages addressed by Frenchmen to their wives, scrawled surreptitiously on the planks of Hun dug-outs in the hope that one day the dug-outs would be captured, and the messages passed on by a soldier of the Allies.  After three and a half years of enforced labour, many of these captured civilians are worked out.  To the Boche, with his ever-increasing food-shortage, they represent useless mouths.  Instead of filling them he is driving their owners back, broken and useless, by way of Switzerland.  To him human beings are merchandise to be sold upon the hoof like cattle.  No spiritual values enter into the bargain.  When the body is exhausted it is sent to the knacker’s, as though it belonged to a worn-out horse.  The entire attitude is materialistic and degrading.  Evian-les-Bains, the once gay gambling resort of the cosmopolitan, has become the knacker’s shop for French civilians exhausted by their German servitude.  The Hun shoves them across the border at the rate of about 1,300 a day.  From the start I have always felt that this war was a crusade; what I saw at Evian made me additionally certain.  When I was in the trenches I never had any hatred of the Boche.  Probably I shall lose my hatred in pity for him when I get to the Front again—­but for the present I hate him.  It’s here in France that one sees what a vileness he has created in the children’s and women’s lives.

I took the night train down from Paris.  Early in the morning I woke up to find myself in the gorges of the Alps, high peaks with romantic Italian-looking settings soaring on every side.  At noon we reached Lake Geneva, lying slate-coloured and sombre beneath a wintry sky.  That afternoon I saw the train of repatries arrive.

I was on the platform when the train pulled into the station.  It might have been a funeral cortege, only there was a horrible difference:  the corpses pretended to be alive.  The American Ambulance men were there in force.  They climbed into the carriages and commenced to help the infirm to alight.  The exiles were all so stiff with travel that they could scarcely move at first.  The windows of the train were grey with faces.  Such faces!  All of them old, even the little children’s.  The Boche makes a present to France of only such human wreckage as is unuseful for his purposes.  He is an acute man of business.  The convoy consisted of two classes of persons—­the very ancient and the very juvenile.  You can’t set a man of eighty to dig trenches and you can’t make a prostitute out of a girl-child of ten.  The only boys were of the mal-nourished variety.  Men, women and children—­they all had the appearance of being half-witted.