Well, I have really been to Paris, and it was so difficult that I ask
myself why I troubled.
I had to await the pleasure of the commander of the Cinquième
Armée, as the Embassy was powerless to help me, although they did
their best with great good will. I enclose you my sauf-conduit that you
may see what so important a document is like. Then I want to tell you
the funny thing--/ never had to show it once. I was very curious to
know just how important it was. I went by the way of Esbly. On buying
my ticket I expected to be asked for it, as there was a printed notice
beside the window to the ticket-office announcing that all purchasers
of tickets must be furnished with a sauf-conduit. No one cared to see
mine. No one asked for it on the train. No one demanded it at the exit
in Paris. Nor, when I returned, did anyone ask for it either at the
ticket-office in Paris or at the entrance to the train. Considering that I
had waited weeks for it, had to ask for it three times, had to explain
what I was going to do in Paris, where I was going to stay, how long,
etc., I had to be amused.
I was really terribly disappointed. I had longed to show it. It seemed
so chic to travel with the consent of a big general.
Of course, if I had attempted to go without it, I should have risked
getting caught, as, at any time, the train was liable to be boarded and
all papers examined.
I learned at the Embassy, where the military attaché had consulted
the Ministry of War, that an arrangement was to be made later
regarding foreigners, and that we were to be provided with a special
book which, while it would not allow us to circulate freely, would give
us the right to demand a permission--and get it if the military
authorities chose. No great change that.
The visit served little purpose except to show me a sad-looking Paris
and make me rejoice to get back.
Now that the days are so short, and it is dark at four o'clock, Paris is
almost unrecognizable. With shop-shutters closed, tramway windows
curtained, very few street-lights--none at all on short streets--no
visible lights in houses, the city looks dead. You 'd have to see it to
realize what it is like.
The weather was dull, damp, the cold penetrating, and the
atmosphere depressing, and so was the conversation. It is better
here on the hilltop, even though, now and then, we hear the guns.
Coming back from Paris there were almost no lights on the platforms
at the railway stations, and all the coaches had their curtains drawn.
At the station at Esbly the same situation--a few lights, very low, on
the main platform, and absolutely none on the platform where I took
the narrow-gauge for Couilly. I went stumbling, in absolute blackness,
across the main track, and literally felt my way along the little train to
find a door to my coach. If it had not been for the one lamp on my
little cart waiting in the road, I could not have seen where the exit at
Couilly was. It was not gay, and it was far from gay climbing the long
hill, with the feeble rays of that one lamp to light the blackness.
Luckily Ninette knows the road in the dark.
In the early days of the war it used to be amusing in the train, as
everyone talked, and the talk was good. Those days are passed.
With the now famous order pasted on every window:
Taisez-vous! Méfiez-vous.
Les oreilles ennemies vous écoutent
no one says a word. I came back from Paris with half a dozen officers
in the compartment. Each one, as he entered, brought his hand to
salute, and sat down, without a word. They did not even look at one
another. It is one of the most marked changes in attitude that I have
seen since the war. It is right. We were all getting too talkative, but it
takes away the one charm there was in going to Paris. I've had no
adventures since I wrote to you Christmas Day, although we did
have, a few days after that, five minutes of excitement.
One day I was walking in the garden. It was a fairly bright day, and
the sun was shining through the winter haze. I had been counting my
tulips, which were coming up bravely, admiring my yellow crocuses,
already in flower, and hoping the sap would not begin to rise in the
rose bushes, and watching the Marne, once more lying like a sea
rather than a river over the fields, and wondering how that awful
winter freshet was going to affect the battle-front, when, suddenly,
there was a terrible explosion. It nearly shook me off my feet.
The letter-carrier from Quincy was just mounting the hill on his wheel,
and he promptly tumbled off it. I happened to be standing where I
could see over the hedge, but before I could get out the stupid
question, "What was that?" there came a second explosion, then a
third and a fourth.
They sounded in the direction of Paris.
"Zeppelins," was my first thought, but that was hardly the hour for
them.
I stood rooted to the spot. I could hear voices at Voisins, as if all the
world had rushed into the street. Then I saw Amélie running down the
hill. She said nothing as she passed. The postman picked himself up,
passed me a letter, shrugged his shoulders, and pushed his wheel up
the hill.
I patiently waited until the voices ceased in Voisins. I could see no
smoke anywhere. Amélie came back at once, but she brought no
explanation. She only brought a funny story.
There is an old woman in Voisins, well on to ninety, called Mère R---.
The war is too tremendous for her localized mind to grasp. Out of
the confusion she picks and clings to certain isolated facts. At the first
explosion, she rushed, terrorized, into the street, gazing up to the
heavens, and shaking her withered old fists above her head, she
cried in her shrill, quavering voice: "Now look at that! They told us the
Kaiser was dying. It's a lie. It's a lie, you see, for here he comes
throwing his cursed bombs down on us."
You know all this month the papers have had Guillaume dying of that
ever-recurring cancer of the throat. I suppose the old woman thinks
Guillaume is carrying all this war on in person. In a certain sense she
is not very far wrong.
For a whole week we got no explanation of that five minutes'
excitement. Then it leaked out that the officer of the General Staff,
who has been stationed at the Chateau de Condé, halfway between
here and Esbly, was about to change his section. He had, in the park
there, four German shells from the Marne battlefield, which had not
been exploded. He did not want to take them with him, and it was
equally dangerous to leave them in the park, so he decided to
explode them, and had not thought it necessary to warn anybody but
the railroad people.
It is a proof of how simple our life is that such an event made
conversation for weeks.