My Year of the War | Page 7

worse and the next day's still worse. The Germans seemed to be approaching Paris by forced marches. Paris might fall--no matter! Though the French army were shattered, one heard Englishmen say that the British would create an army to wrest victory from defeat. The spirit of this was fine, but one realized the enormity of the task; should the mighty German machine crush the French machine, the Allies had lost. To say so then was heresy, when the world was inclined to think poorly of the French army and saw Russian numbers as irresistible.
The personal call was to Paris before the fate of Paris was to be decided. My first crossing of the Channel had been to Ostend; the second, farther south to Boulogne; the third was still farther south, to Dieppe. Where next? To Havre! Events were moving with the speed which had been foreseen with myriads of soldiers ready to be thrown into battle by the quick march of the railroad trains.
Every event was hidden under the "fog of war," then a current expression--meagre official bulletins which read like hope in their brief lines, while the imagination might read as it chose between the lines. The marvel was that any but troop trains should run. All night in that third-class coach from Dieppe to Paris! Tired and preoccupied passengers; everyone's heart heavy; everyone's soul wrenched; everyone prepared for the worst! You cared for no other man's views; the one thing you wanted was no bad news. France had known that when the war came it would be to the death. From the first no Frenchman could have had any illusions. England had not realized yet that her fate was with the soldiers of France, or France that her fate and all the world's was with the British fleet.
An Italian in our compartment would talk, however, and he would keep the topic down to red trousers, and to the red trousers of a French Territorial opposite, with an index finger when his gesticulatory knowledge of the French language, which was excellent, came to the rescue of his verbal knowledge, which was poor. The Frenchman agreed that red trousers were a mistake, but pointed to the blue covering which he had for his cap--which made it all right. The Italian insisted on keeping to the trousers. He talked red trousers till the Frenchman got out at his station, and then turned to me to confirm his views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After all, he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to write on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen to this sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men lay dead and wounded from that day's fight on the soil of France. Red trousers were responsible for the death of a lot of those men.
Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvest lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to an hotel with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking busily in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre's request that everyone should go on with his day's work.
"They're done!" said an American in the foyer. "The French cannot stand up against the Germans--anybody could see that! It's too bad, but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the next day."
I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all one's belief in the French army and in the real character of the French people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of democracy; it meant disaster to all one's precepts; a personal disaster.
"Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not had their battle yet!" I said.
And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with lots of fight left in it.

Ill Paris Waits

It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city--a Paris without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the shutters of its shops down and its cafés and restaurants in gloomy emptiness.
The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller; the Paris of the boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist; the Paris that sparkled and smiled in entertainment; the Paris exploited to the average American through Sunday supplements and the reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead. Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no