II
WE had been shown, impressively, what it was to live through a
mobilization; now we were to learn that mobilization is only one of
the concomitants of martial law, and that martial law is not
comfortable to live under--at least till one gets used to it.
At first its main purpose, to the neutral civilian, seemed certainly
to be the wayward pleasure of complicating his life; and in that
line it excelled in the last refinements of ingenuity. Instructions
began to shower on us after the lull of the first days: instructions
as to what to do, and what not to do, in order to make our presence
tolerable and our persons secure. In the first place, foreigners
could not remain in France without satisfying the authorities as to
their nationality and antecedents; and to do this necessitated
repeated ineffective visits to chanceries, consulates and police
stations, each too densely thronged with flustered applicants to
permit the entrance of one more. Between these vain pilgrimages, the
traveller impatient to leave had to toil on foot to distant railway
stations, from which he returned baffled by vague answers and
disheartened by the declaration that tickets, when achievable, must
also be _vises_ by the police. There was a moment when it seemed
that ones inmost thoughts had to have that unobtainable _visa_--to
obtain which, more fruitless hours must be lived on grimy stairways
between perspiring layers of fellow-aliens. Meanwhile one's money
was probable running short, and one must cable or telegraph for
more. Ah--but cables and telegrams must be _vises _too--and even
when they were, one got no guarantee that they would be sent! Then
one could not use code addresses, and the ridiculous number of words
contained in a New York address seemed to multiply as the francs in
one's pockets diminished. And when the cable was finally dispatched
it was either lost on the way, or reached its destination only to
call forth, after anxious days, the disheartening response:
"Impossible at present. Making every effort." It is fair to add
that, tedious and even irritating as many of these transactions
were, they were greatly eased by the sudden uniform good-nature of
the French functionary, who, for the first time, probably, in the
long tradition of his line, broke through its fundamental rule and
was kind.
Luckily, too, these incessant comings and goings involved much
walking of the beautiful idle summer streets, which grew idler and
more beautiful each day. Never had such blue-grey softness of
afternoon brooded over Paris, such sunsets turned the heights of the
Trocadero into Dido's Carthage, never, above all, so rich a moon
ripened through such perfect evenings. The Seine itself had no small
share in this mysterious increase of the city's beauty. Released
from all traffic, its hurried ripples smoothed themselves into long
silken reaches in which quays and monuments at last saw their
unbroken images. At night the fire-fly lights of the boats had
vanished, and the reflections of the street lamps were lengthened
into streamers of red and gold and purple that slept on the calm
current like fluted water-weeds. Then the moon rose and took
possession of the city, purifying it of all accidents, calming and
enlarging it and giving it back its ideal lines of strength and
repose. There was something strangely moving in this new Paris of
the August evenings, so exposed yet so serene, as though her very
beauty shielded her.
So, gradually, we fell into the habit of living under martial law.
After the first days of flustered adjustment the personal
inconveniences were so few that one felt almost ashamed of their not
being more, of not being called on to contribute some greater
sacrifice of comfort to the Cause. Within the first week over two
thirds of the shops had closed--the greater number bearing on their
shuttered windows the notice "Pour cause de mobilisation," which
showed that the "patron" and staff were at the front. But enough
remained open to satisfy every ordinary want, and the closing of the
others served to prove how much one could do without. Provisions
were as cheap and plentiful as ever, though for a while it was
easier to buy food than to have it cooked. The restaurants were
closing rapidly, and one often had to wander a long way for a meal,
and wait a longer time to get it. A few hotels still carried on a
halting life, galvanized by an occasional inrush of travel from
Belgium and Germany; but most of them had closed or were being
hastily transformed into hospitals.
The signs over these hotel doors first disturbed the dreaming
harmony of Paris. In a night, as it seemed, the whole city was hung
with Red Crosses. Every other building showed the red and white band
across its front, with "Ouvroir" or "Hopital" beneath; there
was something sinister in these preparations for horrors in which
one could not yet believe, in the making of bandages for limbs yet
sound and whole, the spreading of pillows for heads yet carried
high. But insist as they would on the woe to come, these warning
signs did not deeply stir the trance of Paris. The first days of the
war were full of a kind of unrealizing confidence, not boastful or
fatuous, yet as different as possible from the clear-headed tenacity
of purpose that the experience of the next few months was to
develop. It is hard to evoke, without seeming to exaggerate it, that
the mood of early August: the assurance, the balance, the kind of
smiling fatalism with which Paris moved to her task. It is not
impossible that the beauty of the season and the silence of the city
may have helped to produce this mood. War, the shrieking fury, had
announced herself by a great wave of stillness. Never was desert
hush more complete: the silence of a street is always so much deeper
than the silence of wood or field.
The heaviness of the August air intensified this impression of
suspended life. The days were dumb enough; but at night the hush
became acute. In the quarter I inhabit, always deserted in summer,
the shuttered streets were mute as catacombs, and the faintest
pin-prick of noise seemed to tear a rent in a black pall of silence.
I could hear the tired tap of a lame hoof half a mile away, and the
tread of the policeman guarding the Embassy across the street beat
against the pavement like a series of detonations. Even the
variegated noises of the city's waking-up had ceased. If any
sweepers, scavengers or rag-pickers still plied their trades they
did it as secretly as ghosts. I remember one morning being roused
out of a deep sleep by a sudden explosion of noise in my room. I sat
up with a start, and found I had been waked by a low-voiced exchange
of "Bonjours" in the street...
Another fact that kept the reality of war from Paris was the curious
absence of troops in the streets. After the first rush of conscripts
hurrying to their military bases it might have been imagined that
the reign of peace had set in. While smaller cities were swarming
with soldiers no glitter of arms was reflected in the empty avenues
of the capital, no military music sounded through them. Paris
scorned all show of war, and fed the patriotism of her children on
the mere sight of her beauty. It was enough.
Even when the news of the first ephemeral successes in Alsace began
to come in, the Parisians did not swerve from their even gait. The
newsboys did all the shouting--and even theirs was presently
silenced by decree. It seemed as though it had been unanimously,
instinctively decided that the Paris of 1914 should in no respect
resemble the Paris of 1870, and as though this resolution had passed
at birth into the blood of millions born since that fatal date, and
ignorant of its bitter lesson. The unanimity of self-restraint was
the notable characteristic of this people suddenly plunged into an
unsought and unexpected war. At first their steadiness of spirit
might have passed for the bewilderment of a generation born and bred
in peace, which did not yet understand what war implied. But it is
precisely on such a mood that easy triumphs might have been supposed
to have the most disturbing effect. It was the crowd in the street
that shouted "A Berlin!" in 1870; now the crowd in the street
continued to mind its own business, in spite of showers of extras
and too-sanguine bulletins.
I remember the morning when our butcher's boy brought the news that
the first German flag had been hung out on the balcony of the
Ministry of War. Now I thought, the Latin will boil over! And I
wanted to be there to see. I hurried down the quiet rue de
Martignac, turned the corner of the Place Sainte Clotilde, and came
on an orderly crowd filling the street before the Ministry of War.
The crowd was so orderly that the few pacific gestures of the police
easily cleared a way for passing cabs, and for the military motors
perpetually dashing up. It was composed of all classes, and there
were many family groups, with little boys straddling their mothers'
shoulders, or lifted up by the policemen when they were too heavy
for their mothers. It is safe to say that there was hardly a man or
woman of that crowd who had not a soldier at the front; and there
before them hung the enemy's first flag--a splendid silk flag, white
and black and crimson, and embroidered in gold. It was the flag of
an Alsatian regiment--a regiment of Prussianized Alsace. It
symbolized all they most abhorred in the whole abhorrent job that
lay ahead of them; it symbolized also their finest ardour and their
noblest hate, and the reason why, if every other reason failed,
France could never lay down arms till the last of such flags was
low. And there they stood and looked at it, not dully or
uncomprehendingly, but consciously, advisedly, and in silence; as if
already foreseeing all it would cost to keep that flag and add to it
others like it; forseeing the cost and accepting it. There seemed to
be men's hearts even in the children of that crowd, and in the
mothers whose weak arms held them up. So they gazed and went on, and
made way for others like them, who gazed in their turn and went on
too. All day the crowd renewed itself, and it was always the same
crowd, intent and understanding and silent, who looked steadily at
the flag, and knew what its being there meant. That, in August, was
the look of Paris.
