A Traveller in War-Time | Page 5

like beads over the crest of
a hill, and, below these, dim rows of houses, all of a sameness,
stretching along monotonous streets. A munitions town in the night.
One could have tossed a biscuit on the stone wharfs where the
workmen, crouching over their tasks, straightened up at sight of us and
cheered. And one cried out hoarsely, "Vous venez nous sauver, vous
Americains" --"You come to save us"--an exclamation I was to hear

again in the days that followed.

III
All day long, as the 'rapide' hurried us through the smiling wine country
and past the well-remembered chateaux of the Loire, we wondered how
we should find Paris--beautiful Paris, saved from violation as by a
miracle! Our first discovery, after we had pushed our way out of the
dim station into the obscurity of the street, was that of the absence of
taxicabs. The horsedrawn buses ranged along the curb were reserved
for the foresighted and privileged few. Men and women were rushing
desperately about in search of conveyances, and in the midst of this
confusion, undismayed, debonnair, I spied a rugged, slouch-hatted
figure standing under a lamp--the unmistakable American soldier.
"Aren't there any cabs in Paris?" I asked.
"Oh, yes, they tell me they're here," he said. "I've given a man a dollar
to chase one."
Evidently one of our millionaire privates who have aroused such
burnings in the heart of the French poilu, with his five sous a day! We
left him there, and staggered across the Seine with our bags. A French
officer approached us. "You come from America," he said. "Let me
help you." There was just enough light in the streets to prevent us from
getting utterly lost, and we recognized the dark mass of the Tuileries as
we crossed the gardens. The hotel we sought was still there, and its
menu, save for the war-bread and the tiny portion of sugar, as
irreproachable as ever.
The next morning, as if by magic, hundreds of taxis had sprung into
existence, though they were much in demand. And in spite of the
soldiers thronging the sunlit streets, Paris was seemingly the same Paris
one had always known, gay--insouciante, pleasure-bent. The luxury
shops appeared to be thriving, the world-renowned restaurants to be
doing business as usual; to judge from the prices, a little better than
usual; the expensive hotels were full. It is not the real France, of course,
yet it seemed none the less surprising that it should still exist. Oddly
enough the presence of such overwhelming numbers of soldiers should
have failed to strike the note of war, emphasized that of lavishness, of
the casting off of mundane troubles for which the French capital has so
long been known. But so it was. Most of these soldiers were here

precisely with the object of banishing from their minds the
degradations and horrors of the region from which they had come, and
which was so unbelievably near; a few hours in an automobile--less
than that in one of those dragon-fly machines we saw intermittently
hovering in the blue above our heads!
Paris, to most Americans, means that concentrated little district de luxe
of which the Place Vendome is the centre, and we had always
unconsciously thought of it as in the possession of the Anglo-Saxons.
So it seems today. One saw hundreds of French soldiers, of course, in
all sorts of uniforms, from the new grey blue and visor to the traditional
cloth blouse and kepi; once in a while a smart French officer. The
English and Canadians, the Australians, New Zealanders, and
Americans were much in evidence. Set them down anywhere on the
face of the globe, under any conditions conceivable, and you could not
surprise them; such was the impression. The British officers and even
the British Tommies were blase, wearing the air of the 'semaine
Anglaise', and the "five o'clock tea," as the French delight to call it.
That these could have come direct from the purgatory of the trenches
seemed unbelievable. The Anzacs, with looped-up hats, strolled about,
enjoying themselves, halting before the shops in the Rue de la Paix to
gaze at the priceless jewellery there, or stopping at a sidewalk cafe to
enjoy a drink. Our soldiers had not seen the front; many of them, no
doubt, were on leave from the training-camps, others were on duty in
Paris, but all seemed in a hurry to get somewhere, bound for a definite
destination. They might have been in New York or San Francisco. It
was a novel sight, indeed, to observe them striding across the Place
Vendome with out so much as deigning to cast a glance at the column
dedicated to the great emperor who fought that other world-war a
century ago; to see our square-shouldered officers hustling