One of the enemy’s aeroplanes flew above our heads, circled around, and then disappeared.  It dropped no bombs and was satisfied with its reconnoissance.  The whistle of the train shrieked out, and there was a cheer from the French gunners as we went on our way to safety, leaving them behind at the post of peril.

ST. PIERRE DU VAUVRAY, Sept. 6.—­England received a hint yesterday as to a change in the German campaign, but only those who have been, as I have, into the very heart of this monstrous horror of war, seeing the flight of hundreds of thousands of people before an overwhelming enemy and following the lines of the allied armies in their steady retirement before an apparently irresistible advance, may realize even dimly the meaning of the amazing transformation that has happened during the last few days.

For when I wrote my last dispatch from Arques-la-Bataille, after my adventures along the French and English lines, it seemed as inevitable as the rising of next day’s sun that the Germans should enter Paris on the very day when I wrote my dispatch.  Still not a single shot has come crashing upon the French fortifications.

At least a million men—­that is no exaggeration of a light pen, but the sober and actual truth—­were advancing steadily upon the capital last Tuesday.  They were close to Beauvais when I escaped from what was then a death-trap.  They were fighting our British troops at Creil when I came to that town.  Upon the following days they were holding our men in the Forest of Compiegne.  They had been as near to Paris as Senlis, almost within gunshot of the outer forts.

“Nothing seems to stop them,” said many soldiers with whom I spoke.  “We kill them and kill them, but they come on.”

The situation seemed to me almost ready for the supreme tragedy—­the capture or destruction of Paris.  The northwest of France lay very open to the enemy, abandoned as far south as Abbeville and Amiens, too lightly held by a mixed army corps of French and Algerian troops with their headquarters at Aumale.

Here was an easy way to Paris.

Always obsessed with the idea that the Germans must come from the east, the almost fatal error of this war, the French had girdled Paris with almost impenetrable forts on the east side, from those of Ecouen and Montmorency, by the far-flung forts of Chelles and Champigny, to those of Susy and Villeneuve, on the outer lines of the triple cordon; but on the west side, between Pontoise and Versailles, the defenses of Paris were weak.  I say “were,” because during the last three days thousands of men have been digging trenches and throwing up ramparts.  Only the snakelike Seine, twining into Pegoud loop, forms a natural defense to the western approach to the city, none too secure against men who have crossed many rivers in their desperate assaults.

This, then, was the Germans’ chance; it was for this that they had fought their way westward and southward through incessant battlefields from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens and down to Creil and Compiegne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for deathpits.  The prize of Paris, Paris the great and beautiful, seemed to be within their grasp.