Oh, fair dream-city, in which the highest passions of the spirit have
found a dwelling-place--with the rankest weeds of vice--in which so
many human hearts have suffered and strived and starved for
beauty's sake, in which always there have lived laughter and agony
and tears, where Liberty was cherished as well as murdered, and
where Love has redeemed a thousand crimes, I, though an
Englishman, found tears in my eyes because on that day of history
your beauty was still unspoilt.
Chapter V
The Turn Of The Tide
1
The Germans were baulked of Paris. Even now, looking back on
those days, I sometimes wonder why they made that sudden swerve
to the south-east, missing their great objective. It was for Paris that
they had fought their way westwards and southwards through an
incessant battlefield from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and
Amiens, and down to Creil and Compiegne, flinging away human life
as though it were but rubbish for the death-pits. The prize of Paris--
Paris the great and beautiful--seemed to be within their grasp, and
the news of its fall would come as a thunderstroke of fate to the
French and British peoples, reverberating eastwards to Russia as a
dread proof of German power.
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