A Volunteer Poilu | Page 8

could have been much over twenty-one, but they were not boys,
but men, serious men, tried and disciplined by war. The homely one
gave me one of his many medals which he wore "to please the good
Sisters"; on one side in an oval of seven stars was the Virgin Mary, and
on the other, the determined features of General Joffre.
Just at sundown we crossed the great plain of La Beauce. Distant
villages and pointed spires stood silhouetted in violet-black against the
burning midsummer sky and darkness was falling upon the sweeping
golden plain. We passed hamlet after hamlet closed and shuttered,

though the harvests had been gathered and stacked. There was
something very tragic in those deserted, outlying farms. The train
began to rattle through the suburbs of Paris. By the window stood the
Norman looking out on the winking red and violet lights of the railroad
yard. "This Paris?" he asked. "I never expected to see Paris. How the
war sets one to traveling!"

Chapter 2
An Unknown Paris in the Night and Rain

It was Sunday morning, the bells were ringing to church, and I was
strolling in the gardens of the Tuileries. A bright morning sun was
drying the dewy lawns and the wet marble bodies of the gods and
athletes, the leaves on the trees were falling, and the French autumn, so
slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun. At the end of the
mighty vista of the Champs Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe rose, brown
and vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an aeroplane was
maneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a moving speck of white
and silver in the soft, September blue. From a near-by Punch and Judy
show the laughter of little children floated down the garden in outbursts
of treble shrillness. "Villain, monster, scoundrel," squeaked a voice.
Flopped across the base of the stage, the arms hanging downwards, was
a prostrate doll which a fine manikin in a Zouave's uniform belabored
with a stick; suddenly it stirred, and, with a comic effect, lifted its
puzzled, wooden head to the laughing children. Beneath a little
Prussian helmet was the head of William of Germany, caricatured with
Parisian skill into a scowling, green fellow with a monster black
mustache turned up to his eyes. "Lie down!" cried the Zouave doll
imperiously. "Here is a love pat for thee from a French Zouave, my big
Boche." And he struck him down again with his staff.
Soldiers walked in the garden,--permissionnaires (men on furlough) out
for an airing with their rejoicing families, smart young English
subalterns, and rosy-fleshed, golden-haired Flemings of the type that

Rubens drew. But neither their presence nor the sight of an occasional
mutilé (soldier who has lost a limb), pathetically clumsy on his new
crutches, quite sent home the presence of the war. The normal life of
the city was powerful enough to engulf the disturbance, the theaters
were open, there were the same crowds on the boulevards, and the
same gossipy spectators in the sidewalk cafés. After a year of war the
Parisians were accustomed to soldiers, cripples, and people in
mourning. The strongest effect of the war was more subtle of definition,
it was a change in the temper of the city. Since the outbreak of the war,
the sham Paris that was "Gay Paree" had disappeared, and the real Paris,
the Paris of tragic memories and great men, had taken its place. An old
Parisian explained the change to me in saying, "Paris has become more
French." Deprived of the foreigner, the city adapted itself to a taste
more Gallic; faced with the realities of war, it exchanged its artificiality
for that sober reasonableness which is the normal attitude of the nation.
At noon I left the garden and strolled down the Champs Élysées to the
Porte Maillot. The great salesrooms of the German motor-car dealers
had been given by the Government to a number of military charities
who had covered the trade signs with swathes and rosettes of their
national colors. Under the banner of the Belgians, in the quondam hop
of the Mercedes, was an exhibition of leather knickknacks, baskets, and
dolls made by the blind and mutilated soldiers. The articles--children's
toys for the most part, dwarfs that rolled over and over on a set of
parallel bars, Alsatian lasses with flaxen hair, and gay tops--were
exposed on a row of tables a few feet back from the window. By the
Porte Maillot, some of the iron saw-horses with sharpened points,
which had formed part of the barricade built there in the days of the
Great Retreat, lay, a villainous, rusty heap, in a grassy ditch of the city
wall; a few stumps of the trees that had been then