At every mile of it there were people who had
fainted on the wayside, and poor old people who could go no further
but sat down on the banks below the hedges weeping silently or
bidding the younger ones go forward and leave them to their fate.
Young women who had stepped out so jauntily at first were footsore
and lame, so that they limped along with lines of pain about their lips
and eyes. Many of the taxi-cabs, bought at great prices, and many of
the motor-cars had broken down and had been abandoned by their
owners, who had decided to walk.
Farmers' carts had jolted into ditches and had lost their wheels.
Wheelbarrows, too heavy to trundle, had been tilted up, with all their
household goods spilt into the roadway, and the children had been
carried further, until at last darkness came, and their only shelter was
a haystack in a field under the harvest moon.
I entered Paris again from the south-west, after crossing the Seine
where it makes a loop to the north-west beyond the forts of St.
Germain and St. Denis. The way seemed open to the enemy. Always
obsessed with the idea that the Germans would come from the east--
the almost fatal error of the French General Staff, Paris had been
girdled with forts on that side, from those of Ecouen and
Montmorency by the distant ramparts of Chelles and Champigny to
those of Sucy and Villeneuve--the outer lines of a triple cordon.
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