CHAPTER XVIII

PITIFUL FLIGHT OF A MILLION WOMEN

BY PHILIP GIBBS

Of the London Daily Chronicle

THE GERMAN ADVANCE UPON PARIS -- THE PRIZE OF PARIS -- HEROIC EFFORTS OF FRENCH SOLDIERS -- GERMANS BALKED OF THEIR PRIZE -- SIXTY MILES OF FUGITIVES -- TERROR IN EYES -- PARIS THE BEAUTIFUL.

[The following article is reproduced by the courtesy of the New York Times.]

At least a million German soldiers--that is no exaggeration of a light pen, but the sober and actual truth--were advancing steadily upon the capital of France. They were close to Beauvais when I escaped from what was then a death-trap. They were fighting our British troops at Creil when I came to that town. Upon the following days they were holding our men in the Forest of Compiègne. They had been as near to Paris as Senlis, almost within gunshot of the outer forts.

“Nothing seems to stop them,” said many soldiers with whom I spoke. “We kill them and kill them, but they come on.”

The situation seemed to me almost ready for the supreme tragedy--the capture or destruction of Paris. The northwest of France lay very open to the enemy, abandoned as far south as Abbéville and Amiens, too lightly held by a mixed army corps of French and Algerian troops with their headquarters at Aumale.

Here was an easy way to Paris.

Always obsessed with the idea that the Germans must come from the east, the almost fatal error of this war, the French had girdled Paris with almost impenetrable forts on the east side, from those of Ecouen and Montmorency, by the far-flung forts of Chelles and Champigny, to those of Susy and Villeneuve, on the outer lines of the triple cordon; but on the west side, between Pontoise and Versailles, the defenses of Paris were weak. I say, “were,” because during the last days thousands of men were digging trenches and throwing up ramparts. Only the snakelike Seine, twining into a Pégoud loop, forms a natural defense to the western approach to the city, none too secure against men who have crossed many rivers in their desperate assaults.

THE PRIZE OF PARIS

This, then, was the Germans’ chance; it was for this that they had fought their way westward and southward through incessant battlefields from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens and down to Creil and Compiègne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for death-pits. The prize of Paris, Paris the great and beautiful, seemed to be within their grasp.

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.

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 along the main strategical lines, grim sentinels guarding the last barriers to that approaching death which was sweeping on its way through France to the rich harvest of Paris.

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 center of the allied forces toward Creil, Montdidier, and Noyon.

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 in the headquarters of the French army, there were 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 death-blow would again be averted.

HEROIC EFFORTS OF FRENCH SOLDIERS

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 Châlons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and center of France, in garrisons along the Loire. They were all in splendid spirits and utterly undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance.

“It is nothing, my little one,” said a dirty, unshaved gentleman with the laughing eyes of a D’Artagnan; “we shall bite their heads off. These brutal ‘bosches’ are going to put themselves in a ‘guet-apens,’ a veritable death-trap. We shall have them at last.”

Many of them had fought at Longwy and along the heights of the Vosges. The youngest of them had bristling beards, their blue coats with turned-back flaps were war-worn and flanked with the dust of long marches; their red trousers were sloppy and stained, but they had not forgotten how to laugh, and the gallantry of their spirits was a joy to see.

They are very proud, these French soldiers, of fighting side by side with their old foes. The English now, after long centuries of strife, from Edward, the Black Prince, to Wellington, are their brothers-in-arms upon the battle-fields, and because I am English they offered me their cigarettes and made me one of them. But I realized even then that the individual is of no account in this inhuman business of war.

It is only masses of men that matter, moved by common obedience at the dictation of mysterious far-off powers, and I thanked Heaven that masses of men were on the move rapidly in vast numbers and in the right direction to support the French lines which had fallen back from Amiens a few hours before I left that town, and whom I had followed in their retirement, back and back, with the English always strengthening their left, but retiring with them almost to the outskirts of Paris itself.

Only this could save Paris--the rapid strengthening of the allied front by enormous reserves strong enough to hold back the arrow-shaped battering ram of the enemy’s main army.

Undoubtedly the French headquarters staff was working heroically and with fine intelligence to save the situation at the very gates of Paris. The country was being swept absolutely clean of troops in all parts of France, where they had been waiting as reserves.

It was astounding to me to see, after those three days of rushing troop trains and of crowded stations not large enough to contain the regiments, how an air of profound solitude and peace had taken possession of all these routes.

In my long journey through and about France and circling round Paris I found myself wondering sometimes whether all this war had not been a dreadful illusion without reality, and a transformation had taken place, startling in its change, from military turmoil to rural peace.

Dijon was emptied of its troops. The road to Châlons was deserted by all but fugitives. The great armed camp at Châlons itself had been cleared out except for a small garrison. The troops at Tours had gone northward to the French center. All our English reserves had been rushed up to the front from Havre and Rouen.

There was only one deduction to be drawn from this great, swift movement--the French and English lines had been supported by every available battalion to save Paris from its menace of destruction, to meet the weight of the enemy’s metal by a force strong enough to resist its mighty mass.

GERMANS BALKED OF THEIR PRIZE

It was still possible that the Germans might be smashed on their left wing, hurled back to the west between Paris and the sea, and cut off from their line of communications. It was undoubtedly this impending peril which scared the enemy’s headquarters staff and upset all its calculations. They had not anticipated the rapidity of the supporting movement of the allied armies, and at the very gates of Paris they saw themselves balked of their prize, the greatest prize of the war, by the necessity of changing front.

To do them justice, they realized instantly the new order of things, and with quick and marvelous decision did not hesitate to alter the direction of their main force. Instead of proceeding to the west of Paris they swung round steadily to the southeast in order to keep their armies away from the enveloping movement of the French and English and drive their famous wedge-like formation southward for the purpose of dividing the allied forces of the west from the French army of the east. The miraculous had happened, and Paris, for a little time at least, was unmolested.

After wandering along the westerly and southerly roads I started for Paris when thousands and scores of thousands were flying from it. At that time I believed, as all France believed, that in a few hours German shells would be crashing across the fortifications of the city and that Paris the beautiful would be Paris the infernal. It needed a good deal of resolution on my part to go deliberately to a city from which the population was fleeing, and I confess quite honestly that I had a nasty sensation in the neighborhood of my waistcoat buttons at the thought.

SIXTY MILES OF FUGITIVES

Along the road from Tours to Paris there were sixty unbroken miles of people--on my honor, I do not exaggerate, but write the absolute truth. They were all people who had despaired of breaking through the dense masses of their fellow-citizens camped around the railway stations, and had decided to take the roads as the only way of escape.

The vehicles were taxicabs, for which the rich paid fabulous prices; motor cars which had escaped military requisition, farmers’ carts laden with several families and piles of household goods, shop carts drawn by horses already tired to the point of death because of the weight of the people who crowded behind, pony traps and governess carts.

Many persons, well dressed and belonging obviously to well-to-do bourgeoisie, were wheeling barrows like costers, but instead of trundling cabbages were pushing forward sleeping babies and little children, who seemed on the first stage to find new amusement and excitement in the journey from home; but for the most part they trudged along bravely, carrying their babies and holding the hands of their little ones.

They were of all classes, rank and fortune being annihilated by the common tragedy. Elegant women whose beauty is known in Paris salons, whose frivolity, perhaps, in the past was the main purpose of their life, were now on a level with the peasant mothers of the French suburbs and with the “midinettes” of Montmartre, and their courage did not fail them so quickly.

I looked into many proud, brave faces of these delicate women, walking in high-heeled shoes, all too frail for the hard, dusty roadways. They belonged to the same race and breed as those ladies who defied death with fine disdain upon the scaffold of the guillotine in the great Revolution.

They were leaving Paris now, not because of any fears for themselves--I believe they were fearless--but because they had decided to save the little sons and daughters of soldier fathers.

This great army in retreat was made up of every type familiar in Paris.

Here were women of the gay world, poor creatures whose painted faces had been washed with tears, and whose tight skirts and white stockings were never made for a long march down the highways of France.

Here also were thousands of those poor old ladies who live on a few francs a week in the top attics of the Paris streets which Balzac knew; they had fled from their poor sanctuaries and some of them were still carrying cats and canaries, as dear to them as their own lives.

There was one young woman who walked with a pet monkey on her shoulder while she carried a bird in a golden cage. Old men, who remembered 1870, gave their arms to old ladies to whom they had made love when the Prussians were at the gates of Paris then.

It was pitiful to see these old people now hobbling along together--pitiful, but beautiful also, because of their lasting love.

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.

TERROR IN EYES

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 cafés 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 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.

PARIS THE BEAUTIFUL

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.

I looked back upon the beauty of Paris all golden in the light of the setting sun, with its glinting spires and white gleaming palaces and rays of light flashing in front of the golden trophies of its monuments. Paris was still unbroken. No shell had come shattering into this city of splendor, and I thanked Heaven that for a little while the peril had passed.