Not many days after these words were written, I came upon a scene which fulfilled them, too quickly. At a French junction there was a shout of command in English, and I saw a body of men in khaki, with Red Cross armlets, run across a platform to an incoming train from the north, with stretchers and drinking bottles. A party of English soldiers had arrived from a battle at a place called Mons. With French passengers from another train, I was kept back by soldiers with fixed bayonets, but through the hedge of steel I saw a number of "Tommies" with bandaged heads and limbs descending from the troop train. Some of them hung limp between their nurses. Their faces, so fresh when I had first seen them on the way out, had become grey and muddy, and were streaked with blood. Their khaki uniforms were torn and cut. One poor boy moaned pitiably as they carried him away on a stretcher. They were the first fruits of this unnatural harvesting, lopped and maimed by a cruel reaper. I stared at them with a kind of sickness, more agonized than afterwards when I saw more frightful things. It came as a queer, silly shock to me then to realize that in this secret war for which I was searching men were really being smashed and killed, and that out of the mystery of it, out of the distant terror from which great multitudes were fleeing, out of the black shadow creeping across the sunlit hills of France, where the enemy, whom no fugitives had seen, was advancing like a moving tide, there should come these English boys, crippled and broken, from an unknown battle. I was able to speak to one of them, wounded only in the hand, but there was no time for more than a question or two and an answer which hardly gave me definite knowledge. "We got it in the neck!" said the sergeant of the R.F.A. He repeated the words as if they held all truth. "We got it in the neck!" "Where?" I asked. He waved his wounded hand northwards, and said: "Mons." "Do you mean we were beaten? In retreat?" He shrugged his shoulders. "We gave 'em what for. Oh, yes, they had to pay right enough. But they were too much for us. Came on like lice... swarming... Couldn't kill enough... Then we got it in the neck... Lost a good few men... Gord, I've never seen such work! South Africa? No more than child's play to this 'ere game!" He gave a queer kind of grin, with no mirth in his eyes, and went away with the other wounded men. Mons? It was the first I had heard of a battle there And our men were having a hard time. The enemy were too much for us. Was it a retreat? Perhaps a rout? 18 The Philosopher answered these unspoken questions. "You always get the gloomy view from wounded men. I dare say it's not an easy thing to stop those blighters, but I've faith in the justice of God. The Great Power ain't going to let Prussian militarism win out. It's going to be smashed because of its essential rottenness. It's all right, laddie!"