The Soul of the War | Page 9

enthusiastic speeches which rang false,
and pledged their allegiance to the lost provinces--"Quand même!"
There was a good deal of blague in these annual ceremonies, laughed at
by Frenchmen of common sense. Alsace and Lorraine had been
Germanized. A Frenchman would find few people there to speak his
own tongue. The old ties of sentiment had worn very thin, and there
was not a party in France who would have dared to advocate a war with
Germany for the sake of this territory. Such a policy would have been a
crime against France itself, who had abandoned the spirit of vengeance,
and had only one ambition--to pursue its ideals and its business in
peace.
3
There was no wild outbreak of Jingo fever, no demonstrations of
blood-lust against Germany in Paris or any town of France, on that first
day of August, when the people waited for the fateful decision which, if
it were for war, would call every able-bodied man to the colours and
arrest all the activities of a nation's normal life, and demand a dreadful
sacrifice in blood and tears. There was only a sense of stupefaction
which seemed to numb the intelligence of men so that they could not
reason with any show of logic, or speak of this menace without
incoherence, but thrust back the awful possibility with one word,
uttered passionately and repeated a thousand times a day: "Incroyable!"
This word was dinned in my ears. I caught the sound of it as I walked
along the boulevards. It would come like a refrain at the end of
sentences spoken by little groups of men and women sitting outside the
cafés and reading every issue of those innumerable newspapers which
flung out editions at every hour. It was the answer I had from men of
whom I tried to get a clue to the secret movements of diplomacy, and
an answer to that question of war or peace. "C'est incroyable!" They
found it hard to believe--they would not believe-- that without any
provocation from France, without any challenge, Germany would
deliberately, force this war upon the Triple Entente and make a bloody

shambles of European civilization. Beneath this incredulity, this
stupefaction, there was among most of the Frenchmen whom I
personally encountered a secret dread that France was unready for the
great ordeal of war and that its outbreak would find her divided by
political parties, inefficient in organization, corrupt in some of her
Government departments. The Socialists and Syndicalists who had
fought against the three years' service might refuse to march. Only a
few months before a deputy had hinted at grave scandals in the
provisioning and equipment of the army.
The history of 1870, with its awful revelations of disorganization and
unreadiness was remembered now and lay heavy upon the hearts of
those educated Frenchmen who, standing outside the political arena,
distrust all politicians, having but little faith in their honesty or their
ability. Who could tell whether France--the new France she had been
called--would rise above her old weaknesses and confront the peril of
this war with a strong, pure, and undivided spirit?
5
On August 1 there was a run on one of the banks. I passed its doors and
saw them besieged by thousands of middle-class men and women
drawn up in a long queue waiting very quietly--with a strange quietude
for any crowd in Paris--to withdraw the savings of a lifetime or the
capital of their business houses. There were similar crowds outside
other banks, and on the faces of these people there was a look of
brooding fear, as though all that they had fought and struggled for, the
reward of all their petty economies and meannesses, and shifts and
tricks, and denials of self-indulgences and starvings of soul might be
suddenly snatched from them and leave them beggared. A shudder
went through one such crowd when a young man came to speak to
them from the steps of the bank. It was a kind of shuddering sigh,
followed by loud murmurings, and here and there angry protests. The
cashiers had been withdrawn from their desks and cheques could not be
paid.
"We are ruined already!" said a woman. "This war will take all our
money! Oh, my God!"

She made her way through the crowd with a fixed white face and
burning eyes.
6
It was strange how in a day all gold disappeared from Paris. I could not
see the glint of it anywhere, unless I drew it from my own purse. Even
silver was very scarce and everybody was trying to cash notes, which
were refused by the shopkeepers. When I put one of them down on a
table at the Café Tourtel the waiter shook his head and said, "La petite
monnaie, s'il vous plaît!"