That first awful period of consternation eloquently revealed how little France had premeditated conflict with her neighbour, and makes the ever-glorious and miraculous resistance of her and England’s armies, against Germany’s superior forces and perfected equipment, stand out as the one astounding marvel of the war. When my companion and I were startled, while on a holiday expedition in the French Alps, by the tocsin’s ominous tolling, we were as dazed as were all others in the quiet Alpine hamlet so abruptly shaken from its world-ignoring calm. To us, descending from the eternal peace of snow-clad peaks, knowing nothing of the menace that so rapidly rushed the mightiest of nations into conflict such as the world has never before known, the scene of despair awakened by that summons was inexpressibly affecting. We had left the village in all the joy and prosperity of its gladdest season, and returned to find its streets thronged with weeping and frenzied women, neglected children, and pale-faced men, too stunned for speech. It was as though some inexplicable cataclysm had struck the place, turning a sane community mad; for at first the significance of that slowly tolling bell was not clear to us. The appalling truth, however, became quickly known, and we, with other aliens, were obliged, if not provided with a _permis de séjour_, to leave the locality within twelve hours and fly from France. The journey to Paris of twenty-eight hours, side-tracked and shut up as we were in a suffocatingly overcrowded carriage, without food or water, was an experience not likely to be forgotten by anyone who suffered it. It served as a preface to war; a preface which, save for the lack of bloodshed, contained all the moral miseries of battle—struggle, menace, suffering, and even the proximity of death, for several children and women nearly perished of thirst and suffocation. As the Paris banks were also closed to foreign credit, we arrived there to find no means of increasing our funds in hand—only sufficient to cover the journey back to Brussels (our place of residence), whither, after a much-needed night of repose, we expected to continue our journey the following morning. But “_La Guerre_” willed otherwise! All trains being monopolized for the transfer of troops, we, with several American millionaires and other foreigners, were forced to exist on trust, for a period that appeared indefinite, within the palatial walls of the Grand Hotel.