In Beauvais there was hardly a living soul when three English correspondents went there, after escape from Amiens, now in German hands. A tall cuirassier stood by some bags of gunpowder, ready to blow up the bridge. The streets were strewn with barbed wire and broken bottles⁠ ⁠… In Paris there was a great fear and solitude, except where grief-stricken crowds stormed the railway stations for escape and where French and British soldiers⁠—stragglers all⁠—drank together, and sang above their broken glasses, and cursed the war and the Germans.

And down all the roads from the front, on every day in every month of that first six months of war⁠—as afterward⁠—came back the tide of wounded; wounded everywhere, maimed men at every junction; hospitals crowded with blind and dying and moaning men.⁠ ⁠…