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Antwerp to Gallipoli A Year of the War on Many Fronts-and Behind Them

Chapter 2 No.2

Word Count: 2543    |    Released on: 06/12/2017

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pe and Havre might at any moment follow. You must go now

. A big canvas bag full of golf-clubs leaned against the wall behind him, and he had been trying to play golf at one of the east-coast seaside places in England. But one couldn't play in a time like this, and the young man sighed and waved his hands rather desperately-one couldn't settle down to anything. So he was going home. To fight ?-I suggested. Possibly, he said-the army had refused him several years

ng post-cards to the boys he had been visiting in England and reading General von Bernhardi. "The first chapter, 'The Right t

rs in the windows, a quay with the baggy red breeches of French soldiers showing here and there-just such a scene as they paint on theatre curtains at home. A smoky tug whistled uproariously,

some thought the Germans would be in Dieppe in a day or two. Our train was supposed to start as soon as the boat arrived an

a third-class compartment. Two ladies, with the three little children, were hurrying away from the battle that their husbands .thought was going to be fought near Diep

. He returned to his corner, rubbed his fists into his eyes, and the tears rolled out under them. Then the two little girls- twins, it seemed, about four years old, in little mushroom hats-took their turns, and they put

nting for a place to squeeze in, and now and then empty troop-trains jolted by, smelling of horses. In the confusion at Dieppe we had had no time to get anything to eat, and several hours went by before, at a station lunchroom, alread

ance, wrapped in war and moonlight, half real beings who had been adventuring together, not for hours, but for years. The dim figure on the left sighed, tried one position and anoth

," laughed the mother of the two little g

et!" cried the lady with the little girls. But the figure kept staring in, and, turning, chattered to others like him. There was a crowd of them, men from France's African colonies,

ed on the floor. They talked broken French or Italian or their native speech and now and then broke into snatches of a wild sort of song. In Paris girls ran into the street and threw their arms about

the gray light was not that of the moon. The lady at my left sat upright. "The day comes!" she said briskly. It grew lighter. We passed sentries, rifles stacked on station platforms, woods-the forest of St. Germain. These woods were misty blue in the cool autumn morning, there were bivouac fires, coffee-pots on the coals, and standing beside these fires soldiers in kepis and red trousers and heavy blue coats with the flaps

abs piled with the luggage of those trying to get away, almost no way to traverse the splendid distances but to walk. Papers could not be cried aloud on

us." Thus George Clemenceau was writing in L'Homme Libre, and people knew that this was true. And yet in that ghastly silence of Paris, broken only by the constant flight of military automobiles, screaming through the streets on missions nobody understood, those left behind did not

been the hour of the German aeroplane. It had come that afternoon, dropped a few bombs-"quelques ordures"-and sailed away to return next day at the same hour. "You have remarked,

ple, all looking upward. Back along the boulevards, on roofs on both banks, all Paris, in fact, was similarly staring-"Le nez en l'air." And straight overhead, so far up tha

as "Mr. Taube's" reception here. He might have been a holiday balloon or some particularly fancy piece of fireworks. Everywhere people were staring upward, looking through their closed fists, throug

ées. There was a "Bang!" at which everybody shouted "There!" but it was not a bomb, only part of the absurd fusillade that now began. They were firing from the Eiffel Tower, whence they might possibly have hit something, and from roofs with ordinary guns and revolvers which could not possibly have hit anything at all. In the gray haze that hung over Paris the next morning, I wandered through empty streets and finally, with some vague notion of looking out, up the hill of Montmartre. All Paris lay below, mysterious in the mist, with that strange, poignant beauty of something trembling on the v

nd it was rather difficult-a mournful sort of recitative with sudden shifts into marching rhythm-and so the people sang the words over and over with her until they had almost learned the tune. You can imagine how a Frenchman-he was a young fellow, who lived in a rear tenement over on the other side of Montmartre-would write that song. The little boy, who was going to "free his brothers back there in Alsace" when he grew up, playing soldier-"Joyeux, i

, Paris of lost Alsace and hopeless revanche, of ardor and charm crushed once, as they might be again, as the voice of that pale girl in black, with her air of coming from lights and cigarette smoke, and of these s

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