Once when I saw an exhausted old man fall at the roadside, near our fort, and heard him beg his companions to abandon him that they might make better speed, I recalled a scene indelibly graved on my memory. It was in China. We were moving toward Pekin in August, 1900. We pushed back before us the Boxer insurgents, whom we, with the Japanese and the Russians, had routed at Pei-Tsang. One evening when hunger tortured us, some companions and myself started out in search of food. We reached a farm isolated in the midst of a rice-swamp, and we entered, just as armed men, conquerors, may enter anywhere. There was not a soul in the numerous buildings of the extensive plantation--or so it seemed at first. Finally, I went alone into one of the houses, and there came face to face with a very old woman, shrivelled and bent, with straggling wisps of hair, grimacing and repulsive. She instantly thought that her last hour had come. I had no bad intentions, but she could read my white face no better than I could have read her yellow countenance had our positions been reversed. She was overcome with fear, and her fright caused such facial contortions that I had a feeling of deepest pity for her. I tried without success to reassure her. Each of my gestures seemed to her a threat of death. She crouched before me, supplicating with most piteous cries and lamentations, until I, finding no gestures that would explain what I wanted, left the room. She followed me as I withdrew, bending to kiss each footprint as if to express her gratitude for the sparing of her life. At that time I had thought of what my own grandmother would feel were she suddenly confronted by a German soldier in her own home in France. My imagination had formed such a vivid picture that I remembered it fourteen years later when the real scene passed before my eyes. Ah! Free men of a free country! Men whose homes are safe from invasion, men who need not dread the conflagration leaping nearer and nearer, or the lust of your neighbor--fortunate men, imagine these villages suddenly abandoned; these families in flight; these old men stumbling on the stones of the road; these young girls saving their honor; these children subjected to the hardships and dangers of such an ordeal! Search your mind for a picture which may aid you to visualize such a spectacle. For no pen, no brush, not even a cinematograph could depict that terrified mob, that throng pushing on in the rain and the wind; the flight of a people before another people, the flight of the weak and innocent before the strong and guilty. III THE MARNE