We were moving down the hill to the palaces beside the lake—­the palaces to which all France used to troop for pleasure.  We moved soddenly at first, shuffling in our steps.  But the drums were still rolling out their defiance and the bugles were still blowing.  The laziest man in the French Army was doing his utmost to belie his record.  The ill-shod, flattened feet took up the music.  They began to dance.  Were there ever feet less suited to dancing?  That they should dance was the acme of tragedy.  Stockings fell down in creases about the ankles.  Women commenced to jig their Boche babies in their arms; consumptive men and ancients waved their sauce-pans and grotesque bundles of umbrellas.  The sight was damnable.  It was a burlesque.  It pierced the heart.  What right had the Boche to leave these people so comic after he had squeezed the life-blood out of them?

All his insults to humanity became suddenly typified in these five hundred jumping tatterdemalions—­the way in which he had plundered the world of its youth, its cleanness, its decency.  I felt an anger which battlefields had never aroused, where men moulder above ground and become unsightly beneath the open sky.  The slain of battlefields were at least motionless; they did not gape and grin at you with the dreadful humour of these perambulating dead.  I felt the Galilean passion which animates every Red Cross worker at Evian:  the agony to do something to make these murdered people live again.  This last convoy came, I discovered, from a city behind the Boche lines against which last summer I had often directed fire.  It was full in sight from my observing station.  I had watched the very houses in which these people, who now walked beside me, had sheltered.  For three and a half years these women’s bodies had been at the Hun’s mercy.  I tried to bring the truth home to myself.  Their men and young girls had been left behind.  They themselves had been flung back on overburdened France only because they were no longer serviceable.  They were returning actually penniless, though seemingly with money.  The thrifty German makes a practice of seizing all the good redeemable French money of the repatries before he lets them escape him, giving them in exchange worthless paper stuff of his own manufacture, which has no security behind it and is therefore not negotiable.

We came to the Casino, where endless formalities were necessary.  First of all in the big hall, formerly devoted to gambling, the repatries were fed at long tables.  As I passed, odd groups seeing my uniform, hurriedly dropped whatever they were doing and, removing their caps, stood humbly at attention.  There was fear in their promptness.  Where they came from an officer exacted respect with the flat of his sword.  What a dumb, helpless jumble of humanity!  It was as though the occupants of a morgue had become galvanised and had temporarily risen from their slabs.