Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them | Page 7

try to sleep on his shoulder. It
would not derange monsieur in the least. On the contrary...
"You must make yourself at home in France," laughed the mother of
the two little girls. But the other was even more polite.
"Nous sommes en Amerique!" she murmured. The train jolted slowly
on. An hour or two after midnight it stopped and a strange figure in
turban and white robe peered in. "Complet! Complet!" cried the lady
with the little girls. But the figure kept staring in, and, turning,
chattered to others like him. There was a crowd of them, men from
France's African colonies, from Algeria or Morocco, who had been
working in the French mines and were now going back to take the
places of trained soldiers--the daredevil "Turcos"--sent north to fight
the Germans.
They did not get into our compartment, but into the one next to it, and
as there was no place to sit down, stood in patient Arab fashion, and
after a time gradually edged into ours, where they squatted on the floor.
They talked broken French or Italian or their native speech and now
and then broke into snatches of a wild sort of song. In Paris girls ran
into the street and threw their arms about the brave "Marocs" as they
marched by, but the lady with the little girls felt that they were a trifle
smelly, and, fishing out a bottle of scent, she wet a handkerchief with it
and passed it round.
The young Frenchman lit a match--three-twenty. The little boy, rousing
from his corner, suddenly announced, apropos of nothing, that the
Germans ought to be dropped into kettles of boiling water; at once
came the voice of one of the little girls, sound asleep apparently before
this, warning him that he must not talk like that or the Germans might
hear and shoot them. We jolted on, backed, and suddenly one became
aware that the gray light was not that of the moon. The lady at my left
sat upright. "The day comes!" she said briskly. It grew lighter. We
passed sentries, rifles stacked on station platforms, woods--the forest of
St. Germain. These woods were misty blue in the cool autumn morning,
there were bivouac fires, coffee-pots on the coals, and standing beside
these fires soldiers in kepis and red trousers and heavy blue coats with
the flaps pinned back. Just such soldiers and scenes you have seen in
the war pictures of Detaille and De Neuville. Bridges, more houses, the
rectangular grass-covered faces of forts at last; just as Paris was getting

up for breakfast, into St. Lazare station, heaped with trunks and boiling
with people, Parisians, belated American tourists, refugees from
northeast villages, going somewhere, anywhere, to get away. It was
September 2.
There were miles of closed shops with placards on the shutters:
"Proprietor and personnel have been called to the colors"; no buses or
trams, the few 'cabs piled with the luggage of those trying to get away,
almost no way to traverse the splendid distances but to walk. Papers
could not be cried aloud on the streets, and the only news was the
official communiqué and a word about some Servian or Russian victory
in some un-pronounceable region of the East.
"France is a history, a life, an idea which has taken its place in the
world, and the bit of earth from which that history, that life, that
thought, has radiated, we cannot sacrifice without sealing the stone of
the tomb over ourselves and our children and the generations to follow
us." Thus George Clemenceau was writing in L'Homme Libre, and
people knew that this was true. And yet in that ghastly silence of Paris,
broken only by the constant flight of military automobiles, screaming
through the streets on missions nobody understood, those left behind
did not even know where the enemy was, where the defenders were, or
what was being done to save Paris. And it gradually, and not
unnaturally, seemed to the more nervous that nothing had been
done--the forts were paper, the government faithless, revolution
imminent--one heard the wildest things.
Late that afternoon I walked down from the Madeleine toward the river.
It was the "hour of the aperitif"--there were still enough people to fill
cafe tables--and since Sunday it had been the hour of the German
aeroplane. It had come that afternoon, dropped a few bombs--"quelques
ordures"--and sailed away to return next day at the same hour. "You
have remarked," explained one of the papers, "that people who are
without wit always repeat their jokes." And just as I came into the Place
de la Concorde, "Mr. Taube" came up out of the north.
You must imagine that vast open space, with the bridge and river and
Invalides behind it, and beyond the