These were persons who but yesterday possessed a local habitation and a name, a background, old ties and associations, community organization, a life. Abruptly severed from all this, violently hacked off at the roots, they were to-day floating units in a nameless class, droves of a ticket and number, _réfugiés_. I walked up the platform beside their crowded train. A little group still lingered outside: a boy, a weazened old man, and three or four black-clad women, simple peasants, with their household goods in a tablecloth--waiting there, it may be, for the sight of a familiar face, missed since last night. I asked the women where they came from. They said from Boesinghe, which the Germans had all but entered the night before. Their homes, then, were in Boesinghe? Oh, no; their homes, their real homes, were in a little village some twenty kilometres back. And then they fixed themselves permanently in my memory by saying, quite simply, that they had been driven from their homes by the coming of the Germans in October (1914); and they had then come to settle with relatives in Boesinghe, which had seemed safe--until last night. Twice expelled and severed at the roots: where were they going now? I asked the question; and one of the women made a little gesture with her arms, and answered, stoically: "To France"--which was, as I consider, the brave way of saying, God knows. As the case seemed sad to me, I tried to say something to that effect; and, getting no answer to my commonplaces, I glanced up, and all the women's eyes had suddenly filled with tears. And outside the English were still going up with a fine tramp and rumble, nice young clerks from Manchester and green-grocers' assistants from Tottenham Court Road. I have never forgotten that the very last soldier I carried in my ambulance (on June 23, 1915) was one whose throat had been quietly cut while he slept by a flying sliver of a shell thrown from a gun twenty-two miles away. But it will not do, I am aware, to over-emphasize the purely mechanical side of modern war, the deadly impersonality which often seems to characterize it, the terrible meaninglessness of its deaths at times. Ours, as I have said, was too much the hospital view. That the personal equation survives everywhere, and the personal dedication, it is quite superfluous to say. Individual exaltation, fear and the victory over fear, conscious consecration to an idea and ideal, all the subtle promptings and stark behavior by which the common man chooses and avows that there are ways of dying which transcend all life: this, we know, must have been the experience of hundreds of thousands of the young soldiers of France. And all this, beyond doubt, will one day be duly recorded, in tales to stir the blood and set the heart afire.