FRANCE
_Notes taken while Motoring on the Riviera._
MENTONE.
In the southern sunshine it is a strain to realise that France is at
war, that, in the north, the biggest war the world has ever seen is
being fought out desperately day after day. The only unusual sight
is the groups of Senegalais, the French Colonial soldiers, and the
blackest niggers I have ever seen, walking at leisure on the parade
with a curious movement of the arms and of the whole body, which
reminds one, at the same time, of a bear in his cage and the balancing
efforts of a dancer on the tight-rope. They are waiting expectantly to
be sent to the battlefield, and in the meantime enjoying themselves,
walking about holding each other's hands, and laughing at everything
with a wide, good-natured laugh. Everybody likes them and spoils them.
To see the Senegalais walking amongst the palm trees under the tropical
sky of Mentone, clad in dark blue with the wide scarlet belt round
their waists, is really a pleasure to the eyes.
They look and feel at home. When I see a coloured man or a Chinaman
in the Strand I generally feel sorry for the poor beggar; he would be
all right in Pernambuco or in Canton, but in London he looks like a
violation of the natural order of things. That's why I was pleasantly
surprised when I saw the Senegalais of Mentone. Most of them are very
fine fellows, well over six feet, and quite a number show wound scars
and medals, which prove that they will not be new to fire when they
take the field.
In addition to the coloured troops, not many soldiers are seen now
in Mentone, as the wounded sent down here are still in the hospitals,
and only very few risk the air. But a few may be seen in the sunshine,
surrounded by a small crowd of admiring children and of sympathetic
grown-ups of both sexes. The temporary hospitals have been arranged in
a number of the larger hotels which were formerly owned by Germans, and
prove now most useful and comfortable for the French wounded.
Mentone had during the last few years acquired the fame of being one of
the most Germanised towns of France. This sort of pacific invasion was
encouraged by the German Government in the hope that Italy would stick
to Germany in the long-expected struggle, and she could then have a
sort of _avant-garde_ of friends in French territory at the beginning
of hostilities. Instead, when the war broke out, after a week's
hesitation France withdrew practically the whole of her frontier troops
and guns, while Italy was doing the same at the other side.
When the Germans were forced to leave, one of the expelled
hotel-keepers, after passing the Italian frontier, which is at a few
yards' distance from the last houses of Mentone, showing his fist to
the crowd still on French territory, shouted: "_Au revoir!_ In two
weeks in Paris!" His hotel has been the only German house in Mentone
wrecked by the population.
* * *
MONTE CARLO.
In every small town along the Riviera I came across I never failed to
ask: "Are there any British wounded here?"
The answer was always the same "No, not yet, but we are expecting some,
sir"; or, "Mrs. or Miss So-and-So has offered her villa, with doctors
and nurses and everything, so they are bound to come soon."
And this is perfectly true. Everywhere, even in small villages like
La Turbie, English ladies have offered to equip their villas as
hospitals for British wounded. But no one has been sent yet, and the
beautiful houses in that wondrous climate, which would certainly mean a
delightful and quick convalescence, still remain empty.
If no use is made of such generous offers the fault will more easily be
found in England than in France.
During a long motor trip all along the Upper Corniche Road I saw
hundreds of French wounded who have become quite well and will go back
to the front in a few days' time.
I spoke to some of them, and all admitted that there is nothing like
staying, even for a very short time, on the Riviera to pick one up
after the life of the trenches.
Not only wealthy people in their villas, but many among the middle
classes and even poor folk find room for convalescent wounded in their
homes; a doctor goes round every morning, but all the nursing is done
by the families who take charge of the sick men.
Motoring on the Riviera is now a fairly complicated business, in
spite of the passports and other documents which everyone now carries.
At every control--and there is a control at every village--there are
difficulties.
This severity rather surprised me, considering how easily one can get
into France from England, Switzerland, or Italy.
The explanation was given me by a lieutenant, who said that, during
the last few months, German spies had been pouring into France
continuously, either by means of the passports of neutral nations, or
by landing in the seaside towns near the frontier from a small boat.
This accounts also for the fact that sailing or boating has been
forbidden, except in special cases, and for fishing purposes.
The war has affected the Riviera in one curious way. Certain articles
have become quite cheap, others more expensive than usual, owing to the
fact that the goods service with Paris is infrequent and too slow for
perishable stuff, and that Italy, since the war broke out, has stopped
any exportation of foodstuffs.
Eggs, cheese, and butter are getting dearer, while flowers, oranges,
&c., which generally are exported to Austria, Russia, and England, are
now obtainable at extremely low prices.
This last Christmastide the Riviera suffered a famine of
Christmas-trees. The young pines used for this purpose generally arrive
in large quantities during the week preceding Christmas and come from
Col di Tenda, on the other side of the frontier.
But wood is amongst the things the exportation of which from Italy
has been stopped, and as it was too late to get pines from somewhere
else, the children, for the most part, had to be content with curious
substitutes; while the Senegalais in Mentone had their first, and let
us hope last, Christmas-tree made with a huge laurel.
Life is altogether considerably cheaper than usual in Monte Carlo,
at least for the winter visitors. Most of the hotels have reduced
their tariffs, and I could name more than one very first-class house
which, probably for the first time in their existence, have quoted _en
pension_ terms.
Summer is naturally the quiet season on the Riviera, and it is
then that Monte Carlo proceeds with her yearly toilet, undergoes
transformations and improvements. Quite a number of embellishments
had just been started when the war broke out, and at the moment these
constructions remain unfinished, waiting for quieter times.
For instance, the familiar square in front of the Casino, and the Hotel
de Paris, with its lawns and flower-beds, has become an enormous hole,
an excavation which looks like a quarry. In a day still distant it will
become an underground garage in which the cars of the visitors of the
Casino can wait instead of crowding all along the Avenue des Palmiers.
The work, which was begun last summer and should have been finished by
December, was interrupted by the war. The Casino is open, with Louis
Ganne, of "Marche Lorraine" fame, Caruso, and all the other great
artists. None of the usual Russian and American customers are seen in
the _salles-de-jeu_.
When I entered the roulette room the gambling was very slack. There
were only eight or nine people round the green table. Three old ladies
of the special kind one sees only in the Casinos of the Riviera--blonde
wig, wrinkles patiently filled up with pink paint, and a small, sickly
dog emerging from a fur-lined bag--were playing very methodically with
very small stakes; two Americans were staking high and losing a fair
amount; an elderly Englishman of the retired major type was going _en
plein_ every now and again after consulting each time a small red-bound
book, in which all the _en pleins_ of perhaps twenty years were marked,
while a party of Spaniards, evidently new to the green table, were
playing irregularly in a foolish way and losing nearly every time.
A young French artillery officer, still limping, and with his right arm
suspended by a black silk bandage, entered the room, came straight to
the table and put two louis on the 14 a second or so before the _rien
ne va plus_ was pronounced.
The little ball stopped on the 15.
A lady who was with the officer excitedly pinched his undamaged arm.
"You never listened to me, Jean," she called out. "You forgot the
little mark on your left shoulder."
Everyone within earshot, the imperturbable croupier included, smiled.
The officer himself joined in, and could not help giving some
explanation.
"My wife," he said, "insisted on putting my money on the number
corresponding to the number of my wounds. I have fourteen to speak
of, but I did not count a tiny scratch which a bullet made on my left
shoulder."
Then, addressing his wife: "The next time I come back we will count
everything. We'll get an _en plein_ then!"
* * *
NICE.
Though the affluence of foreign people at Nice is, this year, greatly
reduced, the population of the town is perhaps higher than when the
season is in full swing.
Nice has, this year, an unusual class of guests, people who, up to a
few months ago, used to think of Nice as a sort of earthly paradise
reserved to the plutocracy of the new and old world, and who would
never have seen the Côte d'Azur if the war had not chased them from
their homes in the east of France and in Belgium.
Nice has, at the present moment, five or six thousand refugees, and
more are expected. I saw groups of them walking along the long dusty
road that runs at the side of the Paillon, the little torrent which, in
winter, looks quite a respectable river.
Here is nothing of the Nice that English people know; no hotels, no
palm trees, no flower-beds, no smart shops.
The town in its eastern part has preserved its look of sixty years ago,
the only new constructions being two huge hive-like barracks. It is
probably uglier and dirtier than the commercial quarter of Marseilles
itself.
The refugees have chosen as their favourite promenade this dingy
quarter. Here they meet the soldiers who are coming back or are going
to their country, here the Corporation of Nice distributes twice a day
free soup to the poor.
The refugees are not often seen in the smart part of the town.
The Promenade des Anglais, the Jetée, and the Place Massena are a
background too much in contrast with their ragged clothes. They don't
care to walk near the well-dressed people lounging in basket-chairs
along the promenade.
Most of the refugees have taken with them all they could manage to
carry, and it is touching to see how, amongst all their troubles,
seldom have they forgotten the little mongrel dog, faithful companion
in the happy days before the war.
I was contemplating the refugees, and walking down the irregular
pavement of a Genoese-looking street, when a strange sight met my eyes.
Behind a brick wall an extraordinary structure of long wooden bars,
osiers, canes, wire-work, and such-like material, emerged and reached a
height of perhaps twenty feet.
After a minute's uncertitude, I remembered that I was in Nice, the
motherland of the famous Carnival. This complicated construction could
only be the skeleton of His Majesty King Carnival himself, the jolly
deity who presides at the Riviera winter festivities.
"I thought you always burnt your King Carnival at the end of the
season," I said to a native. "How is it that you preserved last year's
dummy?"
"This, sir," he answered, "is not the last Roi Carnival, but the next
Roi Carnival. Nobody thought we were going to take him round the town
this year, but we shall probably have him finished up with canvas and
plaster all the same.
"Of course, it will not be one of our great Carnivals; we have no money
to throw away this winter, but His Majesty will go round the streets
with a German helmet on his head and two upstanding moustaches, and
everybody will enjoy more than usual the moment, at the beginning of
Lent, when the figure will be set on fire."
Really, Nice does not look like a town which will, this year, have
festivities of any kind. There are too many wounded and too many
hospitals; the restrictions imposed by the Government are too strict,
and the people do not seem to want any such amusement. Most of the
luxury shops remain closed, and there is no chance of having an opera
season or the famous Veglione at the Opera.
When walking about in Nice one gets the impression that France's
military resources are almost unlimited. I don't know how many
soldiers are in the town at the present moment, but certainly more
than half the men one meets in the streets are in uniform. The long,
straight Avenue de la Gare, the Oxford Street of Nice, is the favourite
promenade of the military element.
Chasseurs des Alpes and Turcos, Colonial troops and helmeted cavalry,
lend a gay look to the wide, handsome street, and the red and gold of
their uniforms moving about in all directions reminds one of the bright
setting of a patriotic ballet.
Here are the offices of the leading local newspaper. The latest war
news is written in large characters on a huge board hanging from the
second-floor windows. A permanent crowd waits there, commenting on the
cables, with an astonishing abundance of gestures, in a curious mixed
dialect of Italian, French, and Provençal.
Inside the offices is a sort of picture gallery. Photographs of all
the officers and soldiers, natives of Nice who have fallen during the
war, with a record of their deeds, and newspaper cuttings about them,
sometimes in English as well as in French, are hung round the room, to
the respectful admiration of the people.
Pious hands daily place fresh flowers beneath these photographs. All
the men inspect the collection with hats off. An old lady placed
some superb white roses round the picture of a young lieutenant; a
black-haired young girl of the working-class went round with a bunch of
scarlet carnations, and decorated the photos of those soldiers who had
no other fresh flowers.
* * *
PARIS, _February_.
"Paris is desperately dull," said a club acquaintance whose weakness
it is to affect a _blasé_ manner. He made the remark to me just before
I left London, he being newly returned from a tour in France. "Nothing
on; nothing left of what we call Paris! It is really the most boring
place on earth."
So it would be for most people, I am afraid--people who have always
refused to see Paris as it is, but who pretend to see it as a town in
which pleasure and habits, life and morals, are abnormal, different,
and possibly opposite to those of all other places on earth.
Such people have never seen--or, at any rate, never understood Paris.
They have only seen the gay if somewhat professional, amusing if
somewhat vulgar, mask the capital of France shows to most foreigners
who do not trouble or who do not wish to see her real face.
At the moment of the declaration of war this mask suddenly dropped, and
Paris appeared to the few foreigners who were there at that time to be
completely altered; anxiety instead of cynicism; patriotism instead of
that curious pose of French people which makes them enjoy running down
their rulers and reading about Government scandals.
All these sentiments, which were either asleep or kept concealed
because they were thought to be much too _vieux jeux_, came out again.
The motto of Republican France, _Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité_ (which
appears so often on the buildings of Paris), ceased to sound ironic and
anachronistic.
Maybe all this seems extremely boring to the more or less real
_viveur_, who cannot conceive Paris without _cafés du nuit_ and
absinthe, shocking little theatres, and all the rest of Parisian
pleasures which are by no means only Parisian nowadays, and which, in
any case, are mostly organised for foreigners and by foreigners.
To my eyes, Paris has never been so wonderful a city as since the war
broke out.
I saw it astonished and overrun by the mobilising troops at the
beginning of the war; ready to fight the invaders and to again undergo
the calamities of 1871, when the investment of the town appeared
unavoidable; full of hope when the tide of the German advance was
suddenly stopped, not a day too soon; decided to make all efforts and
sacrifices to end the war as soon and as gloriously as possible now
that everybody in France is certain of final victory.
It is certainly impossible in hurried notes of this kind to try
and analyse Paris in 1915. It is a subject fit for treatment only
in a book, and a large book, too. The new wave of sincerity and
self-sacrifice has swept away habits and men, affectation and vices;
and one feels that in the future Paris will never again be quite the
same as before the war.
Forty-five years ago the siege destroyed for ever the society Zola has
snapshotted for us in the "Rougon-Macquard." Probably Paris will come
out of the present crisis purified of the _arrivistes_, politicians,
snobs, and pseudo-artists that we all know, thanks to French literature
and the French theatre of to-day.
Then there will be room for a new society, possibly as bad as the
former, and, for a few writers, not quite as entertaining to write
about.