This, then, was the Germans’ chance; it was for this that they had fought their way westward and southward through incessant battlefields from Mons and Charleroi to St. Quentin and Amiens and down to Creil and Compiègne, flinging away human life as though it were but rubbish for death-pits. The prize of Paris, Paris the great and beautiful, seemed to be within their grasp. It was their intention to smash their way into it by this western entry and then to skin it alive. Holding this city at ransom, it was their idea to force France to her knees under threat of making a vast and desolate ruin of all those palaces and churches and noble buildings in which the soul of French history is enshrined. I am not saying these things from rumor and hearsay, I am writing from the evidence of my own eyes after traveling several hundreds of miles in France along the main strategical lines, grim sentinels guarding the last barriers to that approaching death which was sweeping on its way through France to the rich harvest of Paris. There was only one thing to do to escape from the menace of this death. By all the ways open, by any way, the population of Paris emptied itself like rushing rivers of humanity along all the lines which promised anything like safety. [Illustration: THE ANXIOUS HOUR.] Only those stayed behind to whom life means very little away from Paris and who if death came desired to die in the city of their life. Again I write from what I saw and to tell the honest truth from what I suffered, for the fatigue of this hunting for facts behind the screen of war is exhausting to all but one’s moral strength, and even to that. I found myself in the midst of a new and extraordinary activity of the French and English armies. Regiments were being rushed up to the center of the allied forces toward Creil, Montdidier, and Noyon. This great movement continued for several days, putting to a severe test the French railway system, which is so wonderfully organized that it achieved this mighty transportation of troops with clockwork regularity. Working to a time-table dictated by some great brain in the headquarters of the French army, there were calculated with perfect precision the conditions of a network of lines on which troop trains might be run to a given point. It was an immense victory of organization, and a movement which heartened one observer at least to believe that the German death-blow would again be averted. HEROIC EFFORTS OF FRENCH SOLDIERS I saw regiment after regiment entraining. Men from the Southern Provinces, speaking the patois of the South; men from the Eastern Departments whom I had seen a month before, at the beginning of the war, at Châlons and Epernay and Nancy, and men from the southwest and center of France, in garrisons along the Loire. They were all in splendid spirits and utterly undaunted by the rapidity of the German advance.