Yet then, before the transformation, the days were full of torture for those who knew something of the truth. By what fatal microbe of folly had the French generals been tempted towards that adventure in Alsace? Sentiment, overwhelming common sense, had sent the finest troops in France to the frontiers of the "lost provinces," so that Paris might have its day of ecstasy round the statue of Quand-Même. While the Germans were smashing their way through Belgium, checked only a little while at Liège and giving a clear warning of the road by which they would come to France, the French active army was massed in the east from Luxembourg to Nancy and wasting the strength which should have been used to bar the northern roads, in pressing forward to Mulhouse and Altkirch. It gave Georges Scott the subject of a beautiful allegory in L'Illustration--that French soldier clasping the Alsatian girl rescued from the German grip. It gave Parisian journalists, gagged about all other aspects of the war zone, a chance of heroic writing, filled with the emotion of old heartaches now changed to joy. Only the indiscretion of a deputy hinted for a moment at a bad reverse at Mulhouse, when a regiment recruited from the South, broke and fled under the fire of German guns because they were unsupported by their own artillery. "Two generals have been cashiered." "Some of the officers have been shot." Tragic rumours leaked into Paris, spoiling the dream of an irresistible advance. So far, however, neither Paris nor the French public as a whole had any inkling of graver things than this. They did not know--how could they know anything of this secret war?--that on all parts of the front the French armies' were falling back before the German invasion which bore down upon them in five great columns of overwhelming strength; and that on the extreme left, nearest to Paris, the French army was miserably weak, made up for the most part of old Territorials who were never meant to be in the first line of defence, and of African regiments who had never seen shell-fire, so that the main German attack could only be held back by a little British army which had just set foot on the soil of France.