The Soul of the War | Page 8

sparrows who came to perch on his
shoulders and peck at the bread between his lips, and Punch was still
performing his antique drama in the Petit Guignol to laughing
audiences of boys and girls. The bateaux mouches on the Seine were
carrying heavy loads of pleasure-seekers to Sèvres and other riverside
haunts. In the Pavilion Bleu at St. Cloud elegant little ladies of the
demi-monde sipped rose-tinted ices and said for a thousand times; "Ciel,
comme il fait chaud!" and slapped the hands of beaky-nosed young
men with white slips beneath their waistcoats and shiny boots and other
symbols of a high civilization. Americans in Panama hats sauntered
down the Rue de Rivoli, staring in the shop windows at the latest
studies of nude women, and at night went in pursuit of adventure to
Montmartre, where the orchestras at the Bal Tabarin were still fiddling
mad tangoes in a competition of shrieking melody and where troops of
painted ladies in the Folies Bergères still paraded in the promenoir with
languorous eyes, through wafts of sickly scent. The little tables were all
along the pavements of the boulevards and the terrasses were crowded
with all those bourgeois Frenchmen and their women who do not move
out of Paris even in the dogdays, but prefer the scenery of their familiar
streets to that of Dieppe and Le Touquet. It was the same old
Paris--crowded with Cook's tourists and full of the melody of life as it
is played by the hoot of motor horns, the clang of steam trams, the
shrill-voiced camelots shouting "La Presse! La Presse!" and of the light
laughter of women.
Then suddenly the thunderbolt fell with its signal of war, and in a few
days Paris was changed as though by some wizard's spell. Most of the
children vanished from the Tuileries gardens with their white- capped
nurses, and the sparrows searched in vain for their bird man. Punch
gave a final squawk of dismay and disappeared when the theatre of the
Petit Guignol was packed up to make way for a more tragic drama. A
hush fell upon Montmartre, and the musicians in its orchestras packed
up their instruments and scurried with scared faces--to Berlin, Vienna,
and Budapesth. No more boats went up to Sèvres and St. Cloud with

crowds of pleasure-seekers. The Seine was very quiet beneath its
bridges, and in the Pavilion Bleu no dainty creatures sat sipping
rose-tinted ices or slapped the hands of the beaky-nosed boys who used
to pay for them. The women were hiding in their rooms, asking
God--even before the war they used to ask God funny questions--how
they were going to live now that their lovers had gone away to fight,
leaving them with nothing but the memory of a last kiss wet with tears.
It was not enough to live on for many days.
2
During the last days of July and the first days of August Paris was
stunned by the shock of this menace, which was approaching swiftly
and terribly. War! But why? Why, in the name of God, should France
be forced into a war for which she was not prepared, for which she had
no desire, because Austria had issued an ultimatum to Servia,
demanding the punishment of a nation of cut-throats for the murder of
an unnecessary Archduke? Germany was behind the business, Germany
was forcing the pace, exasperating Russia, presenting a grim face to
France and rattling the sword in its scabbard so that it resounded
through Europe. Well, let her rattle, so long as France could keep out of
the whole affair and preserve that peace in which she had built up
prosperity since the nightmare of 1870!
L'année terrible! There were many people in France who remembered
that tragic year, and now, after forty-four years, the memory came back,
and they shuddered. They had seen the horrors of war and knew the
meaning of it--its waste of life, its sacrifice of splendid young manhood,
its wanton cruelties, its torture of women, its misery and destruction.
France had been brought to her knees then and had suffered the last
humiliations which may be inflicted upon a proud nation. But she had
recovered miraculously, and gradually even her desire for revenge, the
passionate hope that one day she might take vengeance for all those
indignities and cruelties, had cooled down and died. Not even for
vengeance was war worth while. Not even to recover the lost provinces
was it worth the lives of all those thousands of young men who must
give their blood as the price of victory. Alsace and Lorraine were only

romantic memories, kept alive by a few idealists and hotheads, who
once a year went to the statue in the Place de la Concorde and
deposited wreaths and made