Perhaps they wept for sheer weariness after sitting encamped
for hours on their baggage. Most of the men had a haggard look and
kept repeating the stale old word, "Incroyable!" in a dazed and dismal
way. Sadness as well as fear was revealed in the spirit of those
fugitives, a sadness that Paris, Paris the beautiful, should be in
danger of destruction, and that all her hopes of victory had ended in
this defeat.
Among all these civilians were soldiers of many regiments and of two
nations--Turcos and Zouaves, chasseurs and infantry, regulars and
Highland British. Many of these were wounded and lay on the floor
among the crying babies and weary-eyed women. Many of them were
drinking and drunk. They clinked glasses and pledged each other in
French and English and broadest Scotch, with a "Hell to the Kaiser!"
and "a bas Guillaume!" A Tommy with the accent of the Fulham Road
stood on a chair, steadying himself by a firm grasp on the shoulder of
a French dragon, and made an incoherent speech in which he reviled
the French troops as dirty dogs who ran away like mongrels, vowed
that he would never have left England for such a bloody game if he
had known the rights of it, and hoped Kitchener would break his
blooming neck down the area of Buckingham Palace.
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