have been repeated a number of times, and though the bombs have fallen
perilously near precious things, until the Tiepolo frescoes in the
Scalsi church were ruined, no great harm had been done. The military
excuse--if after Rheims and Arras the Teuton needed an excuse--is the
great arsenal in Venice. The real reason, of course, is that Venice is
the most easily touched, most precious of all Italian treasure cities,
and the Teuton, as a French general said to me, wages war not merely
upon soldiers, but also upon women and children and monuments. It is
vengefulness, lust of destruction, that tempts the Austrian aeroplanes
across the Adriatic--the essential spirit of the barbarian which the
Latin abhors.
* * * * *
There are some things in this world that can never be replaced once
destroyed, and Venice is one of them. And there are some things greater
than power, efficiency, and all _kaiserliche Kultur_. Such is Italy
with its ever-renewed, inexhaustible youth, its treasure of deathless
beauty. As I passed through the fertile fields on my way from Venice
to Milan and the north, I understood as never before the inner reason
for Italy's entering the war. The heritage of beauty, of humane
civilization,--the love of freedom for the individual, the golden mean
between liberty and license that is the Latin inheritance,--all this
compelled young Italy to fight, not merely for her own preservation,
but also for the preservation of these things in the world against the
force that would destroy. The spirit that created the Latin has not
died. "We would not be an Inn, a Museum," the poet said, and at the
risk of all her jewels Italy bravely defied the enemy across the Alps.
This war on which she had embarked after nine long months of preparation
is no mere adventure after stolen land, as the Germans would have it: it
is a fight unto death between two opposed principles of life.
"He who is not for me is against me." There is no possible neutrality
on the greater issues of life.
PART TWO--FRANCE
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 café 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 cafés,--and yet they
told so little of what was going on _là-bas!_.... The silence in the
restaurant seemed peculiarly dead. A gathering of Parisians no matter
where, as I remembered, was rarely silent, a French café 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 _bêtise_ 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 Élysées 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 Opéra 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 Française 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 cafés 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 cafés 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 cafés, 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 cafés, the boulevards,--ominous, pitiful
specters of the manless world the war was making.
Hucksters' carts lined the side streets about the Marché Saint-Honoré
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 _à 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--_là-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 _dépôt_. 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 _dépôts_ 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 Élysées 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 cafés, 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 Élysées under the shade of the chestnut trees, in the metro, at the
cafés, 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 reëducate 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 fiancé 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 _communiqué_ 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, _là-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 blessés_" 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 _réclame!_
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 cafés, 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.
II
_The Wounds of France_
The wounds of France are still bleeding. The trench wall still lies
for four hundred miles across the fair face of the country from the
Vosges to the North Sea, and the invader rules some of her richest
provinces, in all an area equal to something less than a tenth of
the whole.
The wounds have already begun to heal in the marvelous manner of
nature: already life has begun again in the valley of the Marne;
the vineyards and grainfields run close up to the front trenches.
Yet even where the scar has covered the wound it is plain enough to
see how deep that wound has been. The scorched and bruised valley of
the Marne, the ruined villages of Champagne and Artois, have been
described many times by visiting journalists, yet it is worth while
to record once more some of the outstanding features of this rape
of France.
* * * * *
To begin with Senlis, which is one of the nearest points to Paris
reached by the German cyclone in September, 1914. There are fewer
older towns in France than Senlis, thirty miles or so northeast of
Paris, the center of the old "Island of France." Once a Roman camp
whose stout masonry walls can still be seen for considerable distances,
it had a mediaeval castle, and, until the greater grandeur of Beauvais
stole the honor, was a bishopric with a lovely small Gothic cathedral.
Its lofty gray spire dominates the green fields and thick woods in the
midst of which Senlis sleeps away the modern day. There are other
curious and beautiful examples of Gothic building in Senlis: indeed,
just here, the experts find the first workings of the principles of
pure Gothic architecture, transforming the round-arched, thick-walled
Norman building. If for nothing more Senlis would have amply earned its
right to live always as the birthplace of French Gothic.