Young boy students, with ties as black as their hats and rat-tail hair, marched in small companies of comrades, singing brave songs, as though they had no fear in their hearts, and very little food, I think, in their stomachs.

Shopgirls and concierges, city clerks, old aristocrats, young boys and girls, who supported grandfathers and grandmothers and carried new-born babies and gave pick-a-back rides to little brothers and sisters, came along the way of retreat.

Each human being in the vast torrent of life will have an unforgettable story of adventure to tell if life remains.  As a novelist I should have been glad to get their narratives along this road for a great story of suffering and strange adventure, but there was no time for that and no excuse.

When I met many of them they were almost beyond the power of words.  The hot sun of this September had beaten down upon them—­scorching them as in the glow of molten metal.  Their tongues clave to their mouths with thirst.

Some of them had that wild look in their eyes which is the first sign of the delirium of thirst and fatigue.

Nothing to eat or drink could be found on the way from Paris.  The little roadside cafes had been cleared out by the preceding hordes.

Unless these people carried their own food and drink they could have none except of the charity of their comrades in misfortune, and that charity has exceeded all other acts of heroism in this war.  Women gave their last biscuit, their last little drop of wine, to poor mothers whose children were famishing with thirst and hunger; peasant women fed other women’s babies when their own were satisfied.

It was a tragic road.  At every mile of it there were people who had fainted on the roadside and poor old men and women who could go no further, but sat on the banks below the hedges, weeping silently or bidding younger ones go forward and leave them to their fate.  Young women who had stepped out so jauntily at first were footsore and lame, so they limped along with lines of pain about their lips and eyes.

Many of the taxicabs, bought at great prices, and many of the motor cars had broken down as I passed, and had been abandoned by their owners, who had decided to walk.  Farmers’ carts had bolted into ditches and lost their wheels.  Wheelbarrows, too heavy to be trundled, had been tilted up, with all their household goods spilt into the roadway, and the children had been carried further, until at last darkness came, and their only shelter was a haystack in a field under the harvest moon.

For days also I have been wedged up with fugitives in railway trains more dreadful than the open roads, stifling in their heat and heart-racking in their cargoes of misery.  Poor women have wept hysterically clasping my hand, a stranger’s hand, for comfort in their wretchedness and weakness.  Yet on the whole they have shown amazing courage, and, after their tears, have laughed at their own breakdown, and, always children of France, have been superb, so that again and again I have wondered at the gallantry with which they endured this horror.  Young boys have revealed the heroic strain in them and have played the part of men in helping their mothers.  And yet, when I came at last into Paris against all this tide of retreat, it seemed a needless fear that had driven these people away.