It was their intention to smash their way into it by this western entry and then to skin it alive.  Holding this city at ransom, it was their idea to force France to her knees under threat of making a vast and desolate ruin of all those palaces and churches and noble buildings in which the soul of French history is enshrined.

They might have done it but for one thing which has upset all the cold-blooded calculations of their staff, that thing which perhaps I may be pardoned for calling the miracle.  They might have done it, I think, last Wednesday and Thursday, even perhaps as late as last Friday.

I am not saying these things from rumor and hearsay, I am writing from the evidence of my own eyes after traveling several hundreds of miles in France during the last four days along the main strategical lines, grim sentinels guarding the last barriers to that approaching death which is sweeping on its way through France to the rich harvest of Paris, which it was eager to destroy.

There was only one thing to do to escape from the menace of this death.  By all the ways open, by any way, the population of Paris emptied itself like rushing rivers of humanity along all the lines which promised anything like safety.

Only those stayed behind to whom life means very little away from Paris and who if death came desired to die in the city of their life.

Again I write from what I saw and to tell the honest truth from what I suffered, for the fatigue of this hunting for facts behind the screen of war is exhausting to all but one’s moral strength, and even to that.

I found myself in the midst of a new and extraordinary activity of the French and English Armies.  Regiments were being rushed up to the centre of the allied forces toward Creil, Montdidier, and Noyon.  That was before last Tuesday, when the English troops [Transcriber:  original ‘toops’] were fighting hard at Creil.

This great movement continued for several days, putting to a severe test the French railway system, which is so wonderfully organized that it achieved this mighty transportation of troops with clockwork regularity.  Working to a time table dictated by some great brain which in Headquarters Staff of the French Army, calculated with perfect precision the conditions of a network of lines on which troop trains might be run to a given point.  It was an immense victory of organization, and a movement which heartened one observer at least to believe that the German deathblow would again be averted.

I saw regiment after regiment entraining.  Men from the Southern Provinces, speaking the patois of the South; men from the Eastern Departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war, at Chalons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and centre of France, in garrisons along the Loire.  They were all in splendid spirits and utterly undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance.