Paris In War Time
Those who, when the Germans approached, fled from Paris,
described it as a city doomed, as a waste place, desolate as a
graveyard. Those who run away always are alarmists. They are on
the defensive. They must explain why they ran away.
Early in September Paris was like a summer hotel out of season. The
owners had temporarily closed it; the windows were barred, the
furniture and paintings draped in linen, a caretaker and a night-
watchman were in possession.
It is an old saying that all good Americans go to Paris when they die.
Most of them take no chances and prefer to visit it while they are alive.
Before this war, if the visitor was disappointed, it was the fault of
the visitor, not of Paris. She was all things to all men. To some she
offered triumphal arches, statues, paintings; to others by day racing,
and by night Maxims and the Rat Mort. Some loved her for the book-
stalls along the Seine and ateliers of the Latin Quarter; some for her
parks, forests, gardens, and boulevards; some because of the
Luxembourg; some only as a place where everybody was smiling,
happy, and polite, where they were never bored, where they were
always young, where the lights never went out and there was no early
call. Should they to-day revisit her they would find her grown grave
and decorous, and going to bed at sundown, but still smiling bravely,
still polite.
You cannot wipe out Paris by removing two million people and closing
Cartier's and the Café de Paris. There still remains some hundred
miles of boulevards, the Seine and her bridges, the Arc de Triomphe,
with the sun setting behind it, and the Gardens of the Tuilleries. You
cannot send them to the store-house or wrap them in linen. And the
spirit of the people of Paris you cannot crush nor stampede.
Between Paris in peace and Paris to-day the most striking difference
is lack of population. Idle rich, the employees of the government, and
tourists of all countries are missing. They leave a great emptiness.
When you walk the streets you feel either that you are up very early,
before any one is awake, or that you are in a boom town from which
the boom has departed.
On almost every one of the noted shops "Fermé" is written, or it has
been turned over to the use of the Red Cross. Of the smaller shops
those that remain open are chiefly bakeshops and chemists, but no
man need go naked or hungry; in every block he will find at least one
place where he can be clothed and fed. But the theatres are all
closed. No one is in a mood to laugh, and certainly no one wishes to
consider anything more serious than the present crisis. So there are
no revues, operas, or comedies.
The thing you missed perhaps most were the children in the Avenue
des Champs Elysées. For generations over that part of the public
garden the children have held sway. They knew it belonged to them,
and into the gravel walks drove their tin spades with the same sense
of ownership as at Deauville they dig up the shore. Their straw hats
and bare legs, their Normandy nurses, with enormous head-dresses,
blue for a boy and pink for a girl, were, of the sights of Paris, one of
the most familiar. And when the children vanished they left a dreary
wilderness. You could look for a mile, from the Place de la Concorde
to the Arc de Triomphe, and not see a child. The stalls, where they
bought hoops and skipping-ropes, the flying wooden horses, Punch-
and-Judy shows, booths where with milk they refreshed themselves
and with bonbons made themselves ill, all were deserted and
boarded up.
The closing down of the majority of the shops and hotels was not due
to a desire on the part of those employed in them to avoid the
Germans, but to get at the Germans.
On shop after shop are signs reading: "The proprietor and staff are
with the colors," or "The personnel of this establishment is mobilized,"
or "Monsieur------informs his clients that he is with his regiment."
In the absence of men at the front, Frenchwomen, at all times
capable and excellent managers, have surpassed themselves. In my
hotel there were employed seven women and one man. In another
hotel I visited the entire staff was composed of women.
An American banker offered his twenty-two polo ponies to the
government. They were refused as not heavy enough. He did not
know that, and supposed he had lost them. Later he learned from the
wife of his trainer, a Frenchwoman, that those employed in his stables
at Versailles who had not gone to the front at the approach of the
Germans had fled, and that for three weeks his string of twenty-two
horses had been fed, groomed, and exercised by the trainer's wife
and her two little girls.
To an American it was very gratifying to hear the praise of the French
and English for the American ambulance at Neuilly. It is the outgrowth
of the American hospital, and at the start of this war was organized by
Mrs. Herrick, wife of our ambassador, and other ladies of the
American colony in Paris, and the American doctors. They took over
the Lycée Pasteur, an enormous school at Neuilly, that had just been
finished and never occupied, and converted it into what is a most
splendidly equipped hospital. In walking over the building you find it
hard to believe that it was intended for any other than its present use.
The operating rooms, kitchens, wards, rooms for operating by
Roentgen rays, and even a chapel have been installed.
The organization and system are of the highest order. Every one in it
is American. The doctors are the best in Paris. The nurses and
orderlies are both especially trained for the work and volunteers. The
spirit of helpfulness and unselfishness is everywhere apparent.
Certain members of the American colony, who never in their lives
thought of any one save themselves, and of how to escape boredom,
are toiling like chambermaids and hall porters, performing most
disagreeable tasks, not for a few hours a week, but unceasingly, day
after day. No task is too heavy for them or too squalid. They help all
alike--Germans, English, major-generals, and black Turcos.
There are three hundred patients. The staff of the hospital numbers
one hundred and fifty. It is composed of the best-known American
doctors in Paris and a few from New York. Among the volunteer
nurses and attendants are wives of bankers in Paris, American girls
who have married French titles, and girls who since the war came
have lost employment as teachers of languages, stenographers, and
governesses. The men are members of the Jockey Club, art
students, medical students, clerks, and boulevardiers. They are all
working together in most admirable harmony and under an
organization that in its efficiency far surpasses that of any other
hospital in Paris. Later it is going to split the American colony in twain.
If you did not work in the American ambulance you won't belong.
Attached to the hospital is a squadron of automobile ambulances, ten
of which were presented by the Ford Company and ten purchased.
Their chassis have been covered with khaki hoods and fitted to
carry two wounded men and attendants. On their runs they are
accompanied by automobiles with medical supplies, tires, and
gasolene. The ambulances scout at the rear of the battle line and
carry back those which the field-hospitals cannot handle.
One day I watched the orderlies who accompany these ambulances
handling about forty English wounded, transferring them from the
automobiles to the reception hall, and the smartness and intelligence
with which the members of each crew worked together was like that
of a champion polo team. The editor of a London paper, who was in
Paris investigating English hospital conditions, witnessed the same
performance, and told me that in handling the wounded it surpassed
in efficiency anything he had seen.