The moment's notice was postponed for months . . . .
The younger ones did not wait for it. They took their chance of
"seeing something," without authority, and made wild, desperate
efforts to break through the barrier that had been put up against them
by French and British staffs in the zone of war. Many of them were
arrested, put into prison, let out, caught again in forbidden places,
rearrested, and expelled from France. That was after fantastic
adventures in which they saw what war meant in civilized countries
where vast populations were made fugitives of fear, where millions of
women and children and old people became wanderers along the roads in
a tide of human misery, with the red flame of war behind them and
following them, and where the first battalions of youth, so gay in
their approach to war, so confident of victory, so careless of the
dangers (which they did not know), came back maimed and mangled and
blinded and wrecked, in the backwash of retreat, which presently
became a spate through Belgium and the north of France, swamping over
many cities and thousands of villages and many fields.
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