But there were some other memories, more easily borne. There was that night, for instance, late in the August of 1914, when three of us were getting away from Creil. It was time to go. We were not soldiers. Lying on the floor of a railway carriage I tried to sleep, pillowed involuntarily on someone's boot. I never knew to whom that foot belonged, for the compartment was chaos, like the world. The carriage light was feeble, and the faces I saw above me drooped under the glim, wilted and dingy. The eyes of the dishevelled were shut, and this traveller, counting the pulse of the wheels beneath, presently forgot everything ... there was a crash, and my heart bounded me to my feet. There had been a fortnight of excitements of this kind. A bag fell and struck me back to the floor. Unseen people trampled over me, shouting. Somebody cried: "Here they are!" A cascade of passengers and luggage tumbled over to a station platform. It was a chilly morning. And where were we? A clock in a tower said it was five. People hurried without apparent reason in all directions. So the world may appear to us if some day we find, to our surprise, that we have returned from the dead. I leaned against a lamppost, my mind gravel-rashed, and waited for something that could be understood. The Germans would do. We heard the enemy was close, and that the railway officials would get us away if they could. The morning became no warmer, there was no coffee, and our tobacco pouches were empty. But at least we were favoured with the chance of watching the French railwaymen at work. This was a junction, and the men moved about as though they were only busy on holiday traffic. They were easy and deliberate. I could see they would hold that line to the last pull of cotton-waste, and would run their trains while there was a mile of track. So we learned gradually that confident invaders are baffled by railwaymen and other common people, such as old women insistent on their cows, almost as much as they are by bayonets. A country's readiness for war may be slight, yet the settled habits of the peaceful Nobodies, which are not reckoned by Imperialists when they are calculating the length of the road to conquest, are strangely tough and obstinate. You could go to a girl at the pigeon-hole of a booking-office in France, demand a ticket for a place which by all the signs might then have fallen behind the van of the German Army, and she would hand the ticket to you as though she had never heard of the War. Then the engine-driver would go on towards the sound of the guns till you wondered, made uneasy by the signs without, whether he was phrenetic and intended to run the enemy down. The train would stop, and while the passengers were listening to the shells the guard would come along and give some advice as to the best thing to do.