Thursday, August 27
Twenty-fifth day of the war. Rain, severe thunderstorm at noon, northwesterly wind. Temperature at five P.M. 17 degrees centigrade.
The huge German army, making its desperate struggle to invade France at many points from Maubeuge to the Vosges, is still held in check. Meanwhile the hand of fate, in the shape of the gigantic “Russian steam-roller,” steadily advances in East Prussia. Cossacks have penetrated to within two hundred miles of Berlin.
Minister of War Millerand has revived the daily meetings of heads of departments at the War Office. To-day the defensive condition of Paris was discussed. Work already in progress, under the supervision of General Galliéni, is pushed forward rapidly and methodically, and obstructions to artillery fire are being cleared away in the suburbs.
I rambled this morning through the so-called German quarter of Paris around the Rue d’Hauteville and between the main boulevards and the Rue Lafayette. All the German and Austrian teutons shops and places of business are closed. The brasseries, where the best Munich or Pilsener beer, with wiener Schnitzel or leber-knoedel suppe could be obtained until the end of July, are invisible behind signless iron shutters. The “intelligence section” of the German general staff had for years obtained precious military information through the enterprising, affable German commercial agents, restaurant keepers, commission merchants, waiters, and hotel errand boys (chasseurs) who thrived in this thrifty quarter.
A wounded sergeant of a Highland regiment, in talking yesterday with an American friend of mine at Amiens station, bitterly denounced the German practice of concealing their advance by driving along in front of them numbers of refugee women and children. The Scottish sergeant said: “Our battalion was badly cut up. We were using our machine guns to repel a German advance. Suddenly we saw a lot of women and children coming along the road towards us. Our officers ordered us to cease firing. The refugees came pouring through our lines. Immediately behind them, however, were the German riflemen, who suddenly opened fire on us at short range with terrible effect. Had it not been for this dastardly trick of shoving women and children ahead of them at the points of their bayonets, we might have wiped out this German rifle battalion that attacked us, but instead of that, we were driven back. Damn these Germans!” With these words the Scottish sergeant, his right arm shattered from shoulder to elbow, climbed into the train of British wounded and was carried off towards Rouen.
A number of French wounded soldiers from the Northern Army arrived in Paris during the night and were sent to the Military Hospital, Rue des Récollets, to the Hospital of Saint-Louis, and to a hospital installed in the College Rollin. Among them were a number slightly wounded, but very few severely. Their spirit seems excellent, and all agree that few were killed considering the number of wounded.
All promise to obey orders more closely when they are well and back in the firing line, and not to be too rash. Rashness and too great anxiety to get at the foe seem, indeed, to have been the cause of a great many casualties.