Voyez! voyez!"
The night porter slammed his own door in a rage. Perhaps there was
pity in his heart as well as rage, but what can a man do when people
demand admittance to an hotel where there are already six people in
the bathroom and sixty on the floor of the salon, and stiff bodies
wrapped in blankets, like corpses in eternal sleep, lying about in the
corridors?
"There are crowds of people sleeping in the open air," he said, and
when I leaned out of the window, staring into the darkness of the
night and breathing in the cool air which had an autumn touch, I saw
dimly on the pavement below huddled figures in the doorways and
under the shelter of the eaves. A baby wailed with a thin cry. A
woman's voice whimpered just below my window, and a man spoke
to her.
"C'est la guerre!"
The words came up to me as though to answer the question in my
own mind as to why such things should be.
"C'est la guerre!"
Yes, it was war; with its brutality against women and children, its
horrible stupidity, its senseless overthrow of all life's decencies, and
comforts, and security. The non-combatants were not to be spared,
though they had not asked for war, and hated it.
Chapter IV
The Way Of Retreat
1
Ominous things were happening behind the screen.
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