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The World Decision, a non-fiction book by Robert Herrick |
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Part 2. France - Chapter 1. The Face Of Paris |
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_ Part Two. France Chapter I. The Face of Paris I shall never forget the poignant impression that Paris made on me that first morning in early June when I descended from the train at the Gare de Lyon. After a time I came to accept the new aspect of things as normal, to forget what Paris had been before the war, but as with persons so with places the first impression often gives a deeper, keener insight into character than repeated contacts. I knew that the German invasion, which had swept so close to the city in the first weeks of the war, and which after all the anxious winter months was still no farther than an hour's motor ride from Paris, must have wrought a profound change in this, the most personal of cities. One read of the scarcity of men on the streets, of the lack of cabs, of shuttered shops, of women and girls performing the ordinary tasks of men, of the ever-rising tide of convalescent wounded, etc. But no written words are able to convey the whole meaning of things: one must see with one's own eyes, must feel subconsciously the many details that go to make truth. When the long train from Switzerland pulled into the station there were enough old men and boys to take the travelers' bags, which is not always the case these war times when every sort of worker has much more than two hands can do. There were men waiters in the station restaurant where I took my morning coffee. It is odd how quickly one scanned these protected workers with the instinctive question--"Why are you too not fighting for your country?" But if not old or decrepit, it was safe to say that these civilian workers were either women or foreigners--Greeks, Balkans, or Spanish, attracted to Paris by opportunities for employment. For the entire French nation was practically mobilized, including women and children, so much of the daily labor was done by them. The little cafe was full of men,--almost every one in some sort of uniform,--drinking their coffee and scanning the morning papers. Everybody in Paris seemed to read newspapers all day long,--the cabmen as they drove, the passers-by as they walked hastily on their errands, the waiters in the cafes,--and yet they told so little of what was going on _la-bas!_.... The silence in the restaurant seemed peculiarly dead. A gathering of Parisians no matter where, as I remembered, was rarely silent, a French cafe never. But I soon realized that one of the significant aspects of the new France since the war was its taciturnity, its silence. Almost all faces were gravely preoccupied with the national task, and whatever their own small part in it might be, it was too serious a matter to encourage chattering, gesticulating, or disputing in the pleasant Latin way. Will the French ever recover wholly their habit of free, careless, expressive speech? Of all the peoples under the trials of this war they have become by general report the most sternly, grimly silent. Compared with them the English, deemed by nature taciturn, have become almost hysterically voluble. They complain, apologize, accuse, recriminate. Each new manifestation of Teutonic strategy has evoked from the English a flood of outraged comment. But from the beginning the French have wasted no time on such _betise_ as they would call it: they have put all their energies into their business, which as every French creature knows is to fight this war through to a triumphant end--and not talk. An extraordinary reversal of national temperaments that! From the mobilization hour it was the same thing: every Frenchman knew what it meant, the hour of supreme trial for his country, and he went about his part in it with set face, without the beating of drums, and he has kept that mood since. Henri Lavedan, in a little sketch of the reunion between a _poilu_, on leave after nine months' absence in the trenches, and his wife, has caught this significant note. The good woman has gently reproached her husband for not being more talkative, not telling her any of his experiences. The soldier says,--"One doesn't talk about it, little one, one does it. And he who talks war doesn't fight.... Later, I'll tell you, after, when _it_ is signed!" * * * * * There were plenty of cabs and taxis on the streets by the time I reached Paris, rather dangerously driven by strangers ignorant of the ramifications of the great city and of the complexities of motor engines. Most of the tram-lines were running, and the metro gave full service until eleven at night, employing many young women as conductors--and they made neat, capable workers. Many of the shops, especially along the boulevards, were open for a listless business, although the shutters were often up, with the little sign on them announcing that the place was closed because the _patron_ was mobilized. And there was a steady stream of people on the sidewalks of all main thoroughfares,--at least while daylight lasted, for the streets emptied rapidly after dark when a dim lamp at the intersection of streets gave all the light there was--quite brilliant to me after the total obscurity of Venice at night! But my French and American friends, who had lived in Paris all through the crisis before the battle of the Marne,--with the exodus of a million or so inhabitants streaming out along the southern routes, the dark, empty, winter streets,--found Paris almost normal. The restaurants were going, the hotels were almost all open, except the large ones on the Champs Elysees that had been transformed into hospitals. At noon one would find something like the old frivol in the Ritz Restaurant,--large parties of much-dressed and much-eating women. For the parasites were fluttering back or resting on their way to and from the Riviera, Switzerland, New York, and London. The Opera Comique gave several performances of familiar operas each week, rendered patriotic by the recitation of the _Marseillaise_ by Madame Chenal clothed in the national colors with a mighty Roman sword with which to emphasize "_Aux armes, citoyens!_" The Francaise also was open several times a week and some of the smaller theaters as well as the omnipresent cinema shows, advertising reels fresh from the front by special permission of the general staff. The cafes along the boulevards did a fair business every afternoon, but there was a striking absence of uniforms in them owing to the strict enforcement of the posted regulations against selling liquor to soldiers. That and the peremptory closing of cafes and restaurants at ten-thirty reminded the stranger that Paris was still an "entrenched camp" under military law with General Gallieni as governor.... The number of women one saw at the cafes, sitting listlessly about the little tables, usually without male companions, indicated one of the minor miseries of the great war. For the _midinette_ and the _femme galante_ there seemed nothing to do. A paternal government had found occupation and pay for all other classes of women, also a franc and a half a day for the soldier's wife or mother, but the daughter of joy was left very joyless indeed, with the cold misery of a room from which she could not be evicted "_pendant la guerre._" They haunted the cafes, the boulevards,--ominous, pitiful specters of the manless world the war was making. Hucksters' carts lined the side streets about the Marche Saint-Honore as usual, and I could not see that prices of food had risen abnormally in spite of complaints in the newspapers and the discussion about cold storage in the Chamber of Deputies. Restaurant portions were parsimonious and prices high as usual, but the hotels made specially low rates, "_pendant la guerre,_" which the English took advantage of in large numbers. The Latin Quarter seemed harder hit by the war than other quarters, emptier, as at the end of a long vacation; around the Arch there was a subdued movement as between seasons. The people were there, but did not show themselves. One went to a simple dinner _a la guerre_ at an early hour. All, even purely fashionable persons, were too much occupied by grave realities and duties to make an effort for forms and ceremonies. Life suddenly had become terribly uncomplex, even for the sophisticated. In these surface ways living in Paris was like going back a century or so to a society much less highly geared than the one we are accustomed to. I liked it. * * * * * Even at its busiest hours Paris gave a peculiar sense of emptiness, hard to account for when all about men and women and vehicles were moving, when it was best to look carefully before crossing the streets. It could not be due wholly to the absence of men and the diminution of business--there was at least half of the ordinary volume of movement. Nor was it altogether a cessation of that soft roar of traffic which ordinarily enveloped Paris day and night. It was not exactly like Paris on Sunday--except in the rue de la Paix--as I remembered Paris Sundays. No, it was something quite new--the physical expression of that inner silence, of that tenacity of mute will which I read in all the faces that passed me. Paris was living within, or beyond--_la-bas_, all along those hundreds of miles of earth walls from Flanders to the Vosges, where for nine months their men had faced the invader. Most of the women one met were in black, almost every one wearing some sort of mourning, for there was scarcely a family in France that had not already paid its toll of life, many several times over. But the faces of these women in black were calm and dry-eyed: there were few outward signs of grief other than the mourning clothes, just an enduring silence. "The time for our mourning is not yet," a Frenchman said whose immediate family circle had given seven of its members. With some, one felt, the time for weeping would never come: they had transmuted their personal woe into devotion to others.... There was little loitering and gazing in at shop windows, few shoppers in the empty stores these days. Everybody seemed to have something important that must be done at once and had best be done in sober silence. Even the wounded had lost the habit of telling their troubles. Doctors and nurses related as one of the interesting phenomena in the hospitals this dislike of talking about what they had been through, even among the common soldiers. Most likely their experiences had been too horrible for gossip. There was a conspiracy of silence, a tacit recognition of the futility of words, and almost never a complaint! One day a soldier walked a block to give me a direction, and in reply to my inquiry pointed to his lower jaw where a deep wound was hidden in a thick beard. "A ball," he said simply. It was the second wound he had received, and that night he was going back to his _depot_. For they went back again and again into that hell so close to this peaceful Paris, and what happened there was too bad for words. It must be endured in silence. There were not many troops on the streets,--at least French soldiers and officers; there was a surprising number of English of all branches of the service and a few Belgians. The French were either at the front or in their _depots_ outside the city. On the Fourteenth of July, when the remains of Rouget de Lisle, the author of the _Marseillaise_, were brought to the Invalides, a few companies of city guards on horseback and of colonial troops in soiled uniforms formed the escort down the Champs Elysees behind the ancient gun carriage that bore the poet's ashes. There were many wounded soldiers, hopelessly crippled or convalescing, in the theaters, at the cafes, and on the streets. As the weeks passed they seemed to become more numerous, though the authorities had taken pains to keep Paris comparatively empty of the wounded. One met them hobbling down the Elysees under the shade of the chestnut trees, in the metro, at the cafes, the legless and armless, also the more horrible ones whose faces had been shot awry. They were so young, so white-faced, with life's long road ahead to be traveled, thus handicapped! There was something wistful often in their silent eyes. To cope with the grist of wounded, the mass of refugees and destitute, Paris was filled with relief organizations. The sign of some "_oeuvre_" decorated every other building of any size, it seemed. Apart from the numerous hospitals, there were hostels for the refugee women and children, who earlier in the war had poured into Paris from the north and east, workrooms for making garments, distributing agencies, etc. All civilian Paris had turned itself into one vast relief organization to do what it could to stanch the wounds of France. Of the relief and hospital side of Paris I have the space to say little: much has been written of it by those more competent than I. But in passing I cannot refrain from my word of gratitude to those generous Americans who by their acts and their gifts have put in splendid relief the timid inanities of our official diplomacy. While the President has been exchanging futile words with the Barbarian over the murders on the Lusitania, to the bewilderment and contempt of the French nation, the American Ambulance at Neuilly has offered splendid testimony to the real feelings of the vast majority of true Americans, also an excellent example of the generous American way of doing things. That great hospital, as well as the American Clearing-House and the individual efforts of many American men and women working in numberless organizations, encourage a citizen from our rich republic to hold up his head in spite of German-American disloyalty, gambling in munitions stocks, and official timidity. * * * * * Already the French had realized the necessity of creating agencies for bringing back into a life of activity and service the large numbers of seriously wounded--to find for them suitable labor and to reeducate their crippled faculties so that they could support themselves and take heart once more. Schools were started for the blind and the deaf, of whom the war has made a fearful number. I remember meeting one of these pupils, a young officer, blind, with one arm gone, and wounded in the face. On his breast was the Service Cross and the cross of the Legion of Honor. He was led into the room by his wife, a young school teacher from Algeria, who had given up her position and come to Paris to nurse her fiance back to life and hope. He was being taught telegraphy by an American teacher of the blind. In such ways the people of Paris kept themselves from eating their hearts out in grief and anxiety. * * * * * At three o'clock in the afternoons, when the day's _communique_ was given out from the War Office, little groups gathered in front of the windows of certain shops where the official report was posted. They would scan the usually colorless lines in silence and turn away, as though saying to themselves,--"Not to-day--then to-morrow!" The newsless newspapers abounded in something perhaps more heartening than favorable reports from the front--an endless chronicle of bravery and devotion, of valor, heroism, and chivalry in the trench. That is what fed the anxious hearts of the waiting people, details of the large, heroic picture that France was creating so near at hand, _la-bas_. There were few occasions for popular gatherings. The taste for "demonstrations" of any sort had gone out of the people. Sympathetic crowds met the trains from Switzerland that contained the first of the "_grands blesses_" the militarily useless wounded whom Germany at last concluded to give back to their homes. And I recall one pathetic sight which I witnessed by accident--the arrival of one of the long trains from the front bringing back the first "_permissionnaires_" those soldiers who had been given a three or four days' leave after nine months in the trenches. In front of the Gare de l'Est a great throng of women and children were kept back by rope and police, until at the appearance of the uniformed men at the exit they surged forward and sought out each her own man. There were little laughs and sobs and kisses under the flaring gas lamps of the station yard until the last _poilu_ had been claimed, and the crowd melted away into Paris. * * * * * Across the street from my hotel there was an elementary school; several times each day a buzz of children's voices rose from the leafy yard into which they were let out for their recess. Again the thin chorus of children's voices came from the schoolroom. It seemed the one completely natural thing in Paris, the one living thing unconscious of the war. Yet even the school children were learning history in a way they will never forget. In one of the provincial schools visited by an inspector, all the pupils rose as a crippled child hobbled into the schoolroom. "He suffered from the Germans," the teacher explained. "His mates always rise when he appears." A French mother walking with her little boy in one of the parks met a legless soldier, and turning to her child she said sternly, as if to teach an unforgettable lesson,--"Do you see that legless man? The _Boches_ did that--remember it!" In these ways the new generation is learning its history, and it is not likely to forget it for many years to come. * * * * * At dawn and dusk in Paris one was likely to hear the familiar buzz of the aeroplane, and looking aloft could detect a dark spot in the clear June sky--one of the aerial guard that keeps perpetual watch over Paris. Sometimes when I came home at night through the dark streets I could see the silver beams of their searchlights sweeping like a friendly comet through the heavens, or watch the dimmed lamp glowing like a red Mars among the lower stars, rising and falling from space to space. Often I was awakened in the gray dawn by the persistent hum of this winged sentry and looked down from my balcony into the misty city beneath, securely sleeping, thanks to the incessant watchfulness of these "eyes of Paris." The aviator would make wide circles above the silent city, then swiftly turn back toward Issy and breakfast. Thanks to the activity of the aerial guard the Zeppelins have done very little damage in Paris and latterly have made no attempts to sneak down on the city. It is too risky. They have succeeded in killing some peaceable folk near the Gare du Nord, in dropping one bomb on Notre Dame, I believe,--for which they have less excuse than even for Louvain or Rheims,--and in making a big hole close to the Trocadero. This after all the vaunted terrors of the Zeppelins! What they have done, what they could do at the best is of the nature of petty damage and occasional murder. Instead of terrorizing the Parisians the Zeppelin raids have merely roused a vivid sense of sportsmanship and curiosity among them--at first they had a real _reclame!_ Day by day as I lived in Paris the city took on more of its ordinary activities and aspects. More people flowed by along the boulevards or sat at the tables in front of the cafes, more shops opened--even the great dressmaking establishments began to operate in an attempt to restore commercial circulation. More transients flitted through the city. There were more people of a Sunday in the Bois and at Vincennes. Considering that less than a year before the national government had left Paris, together with a million of its people, also that the battle-line had remained all these months almost within hearing, it was marvelous how quietly much of the ordinary machinery of life had been set running again. Yet Paris was not the same. It was a Paris almost wholly stripped to the outward eye of that parasitic luxury with which it has catered to the self-indulgent of the world. Paris--as had been the case with Italy--had returned under the stress of its tragedy to its best self--a suffering, tense, deeply earnest self. If the nation conquers--and there is not a Frenchman who believes any other solution possible--victory will be of the highest significance to the race. It will fix in the French people another character wrought in suffering--a deeper, nobler, purer character than her enemies, or her friends for that matter, have believed her to possess. Paris will never again become so totally submerged in the business of providing international frivolities. She has lived too long in the face of death. _ |
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