Those young
writing-men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went back to
Fleet Street with a queer look in their eyes, unable to write the
things they had seen, unable to tell them to people who had not seen
and could not understand. Because there was no code of words which
would convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing
of all civilized laws, to men and women who still thought of war in
terms of heroic pageantry.
"Had a good time?" asked a colleague along the corridor, hardly
waiting for an answer.
"A good time!" . . . God! . . . Did people think it was amusing to be
an onlooker of world-tragedy? . . . One of them remembered a lady of
France with a small boy who had fled from Charleville, which was in
flames and smoke. She was weak with hunger, with dirty and bedraggled
skirts on her flight, and she had heard that her husband was in the
battle that was now being fought round their own town. She was brave--
pointed out the line of the German advance on the map--and it was in a
troop-train crowded with French soldiers--and then burst into wild
weeping, clasping the hand of an English writing-man so that her nails
dug into his flesh.
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