“Vive la France!  Vive la France!” They waved flags—­not the tri-colour, but flags which had been given them in Switzerland.  They clung together dazed, women with slatternly dresses, children with peaked faces, men unhappy and unshaven.  A woman caught sight of my uniform.  “Vive l’Angleterre,” she cried, and they all came stumbling forward to embrace me.  It was horrible.  They creaked like automatons.  They gestured and mouthed, but the soul had been crushed out of their eyes.  You don’t need any proofs of Hun atrocities; the proofs are to be seen at Evian.  There are no severed hands, no crucified bodies; only hearts that have been mutilated.  Sorrow is at its saddest when it cannot even contrive to appear dignified.  There is no dignity about the repatries at Evian, with their absurd umbrellas, sauce-pans, patched-boots, alarm-clocks and bird-cages.  They do not appeal to one as sacrificed patriots.  There is no nobility in their vacant stare.  They create a cold feeling of bodily decay—­only it is the spirit that is dead and gangrenous.

There is a blasphemous story by Leonid Andreyev, which recounts the bitterness of the after years of Lazarus and the mischief Christ wrought in recalling him from the grave.  After his unnatural return to life there was a blueness as of putrescence beneath his pallor; an iciness to his touch; a choking silence in his presence; a horror in his gaze, as if he were remembering his three days in the sepulchre—­as if forbidden knowledge groped behind his eyes.  He rarely looked at any one; there were none who courted his glance, who did not creep away to die.  The terror of his fame spread beyond Bethany.  Rome heard of him, and at that safe distance laughed.  It did not laugh after Caesar Augustus had sent for him.  Caesar Augustus was a god upon earth; he could not die.  But when he had questioned Lazarus, peeped through the windows of his eyes, and read what lay hidden in that forbidden memory, he commanded that red-hot irons should quench such sight for ever.  From Rome Lazarus groped his way back to Palestine and there, long years after his Saviour had been crucified, continued to stumble through his own particular Gethsemane of blindness.  I thought of that story in the presence of this crowd, which carried with it the taint of the grave.

But the band was still playing the Marseillaise—­over and over it played it.  With each repetition it was as though these people, three years dead, made another effort to cast aside their shrouds.  Little by little something was happening—­something wonderful.  Backs were straightening; skirts were being caught up; resolution was rippling from face to face—­it passed and re-passed with each new roll of the drums.  The hoarse cries and moaning with which we had commenced were gradually transforming themselves into singing.

There were some who were too weak to walk; these were carried by the American Red Cross men into the waiting ambulances.  The remainder were marshalled into a disorderly procession and led out of the station by the band.