They did not make much noise in those crowds. There was no loud sound of panic. No woman's voice shrieked or wailed above the murmurs of voices. There was no fighting for the station platforms barred against them all. A few women wept quietly, mopping their eyes. Perhaps they wept for sheer weariness after sitting encamped for hours on their baggage. Most of the men had a haggard look and kept repeating the stale old word, "Incroyable!" in a dazed and dismal way. Sadness as well as fear was revealed in the spirit of those fugitives, a sadness that Paris, Paris the beautiful, should be in danger of destruction, and that all her hopes of victory had ended in this defeat. Among all these civilians were soldiers of many regiments and of two nations--Turcos and Zouaves, chasseurs and infantry, regulars and Highland British. Many of these were wounded and lay on the floor among the crying babies and weary-eyed women. Many of them were drinking and drunk. They clinked glasses and pledged each other in French and English and broadest Scotch, with a "Hell to the Kaiser!" and "à bas Guillaume!" A Tommy with the accent of the Fulham Road stood on a chair, steadying himself by a firm grasp on the shoulder of a French dragon, and made an incoherent speech in which he reviled the French troops as dirty dogs who ran away like mongrels, vowed that he would never have left England for such a bloody game if he had known the rights of it, and hoped Kitchener would break his blooming neck down the area of Buckingham Palace. The French soldier greeted these sentiments with a "Bravo, mon vieux!" not understanding a word of them, and the drunkard swayed and fell across the marble-topped table, amid a crash of broken glass. "Serve him damn well right!" said a sergeant to whom I had been talking. Like many other English soldiers here who had been fighting for ten days in retreat, he had kept his head, and his heart. "We've been at it night and day," he said. "The only rest from fighting was when we were marching with the beggars after us." He spoke of the German army as "a blighted nation on the move." "You can't mow that down. We kill 'em and kill 'em, and still they come on. They seem to have an endless line of fresh men. Directly we check 'em in one attack a fresh attack develops. It's impossible to hold up such a mass of men. Can't be done, nohow!" This man, severely wounded, was so much master of himself, so strong in common sense that he was able to get the right perspective about the general situation. "It's not right to say we've met with disaster," he remarked. "Truth's truth. We've suffered pretty badly--perhaps twelve per cent, of a battalion knocked out. But what's that? You've got to expect it nowadays. 'Taint a picnic. Besides, what if a battalion was cut up-- wiped clean out, if you like? That don't mean defeat. While one regiment suffered another got off light."