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 farther, 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 jauntily at first were so footsore and lame that 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 spilled into the roadway, and the children had been carried farther, 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 the 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.
Then I passed long lines of beautiful little villas on the Seine side, utterly abandoned among their trees and flowers. A solitary fisherman held his line above the water as though all the world were at peace, and in a field close to the fortifications which I expected to see bursting with shells, an old peasant bent above the furrows and planted cabbages. Then, at last, I walked through the streets of Paris and found them strangely quiet and tranquil.
The people I met looked perfectly calm. There were a few children playing in the gardens of Champs Elysées and under the Arc de Triomphe symbolical of the glory of France.