AUGUST

On the 30th of July, 1914, motoring north from Poitiers, we had

lunched somewhere by the roadside under apple-trees on the edge of a

field. Other fields stretched away on our right and left to a border

of woodland and a village steeple. All around was noonday quiet, and

the sober disciplined landscape which the traveller's memory is apt

to evoke as distinctively French. Sometimes, even to accustomed

eyes, these ruled-off fields and compact grey villages seem merely

flat and tame; at other moments the sensitive imagination sees in

every thrifty sod and even furrow the ceaseless vigilant attachment

of generations faithful to the soil. The particular bit of landscape

before us spoke in all its lines of that attachment. The air seemed

full of the long murmur of human effort, the rhythm of oft-repeated

tasks, the serenity of the scene smiled away the war rumours which

had hung on us since morning.

All day the sky had been banked with thunder-clouds, but by the time

we reached Chartres, toward four o'clock, they had rolled away under

the horizon, and the town was so saturated with sunlight that to

pass into the cathedral was like entering the dense obscurity of a

church in Spain. At first all detail was imperceptible; we were in a

hollow night. Then, as the shadows gradually thinned and gathered

themselves up into pier and vault and ribbing, there burst out of

them great sheets and showers of colour. Framed by such depths of

darkness, and steeped in a blaze of mid-summer sun, the familiar

windows seemed singularly remote and yet overpoweringly vivid. Now

they widened into dark-shored pools splashed with sunset, now

glittered and menaced like the shields of fighting angels. Some were

cataracts of sapphires, others roses dropped from a saint's tunic,

others great carven platters strewn with heavenly regalia, others

the sails of galleons bound for the Purple Islands; and in the

western wall the scattered fires of the rose-window hung like a

constellation in an African night. When one dropped one's eyes form

these ethereal harmonies, the dark masses of masonry below them, all

veiled and muffled in a mist pricked by a few altar lights, seemed

to symbolize the life on earth, with its shadows, its heavy

distances and its little islands of illusion. All that a great

cathedral can be, all the meanings it can express, all the

tranquilizing power it can breathe upon the soul, all the richness

of detail it can fuse into a large utterance of strength and beauty,

the cathedral of Chartres gave us in that perfect hour.

It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris. Under the heights

of St. Cloud and Suresnes the reaches of the Seine trembled with the

blue-pink lustre of an early Monet. The Bois lay about us in the

stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as

fresh as June. Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees sloped

downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the

ethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed

with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues. The

great city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces,

seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by the

watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower.

The next day the air was thundery with rumours. Nobody believed

them, everybody repeated them. War? Of course there couldn't be war!

The Cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feet

over the edge; but the whole incalculable weight of things-as-they-were,

of the daily necessary business of living, continued calmly and

convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic

words. Paris went on steadily about her mid-summer business of

feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists who were

the only invaders she had seen for nearly half a century.

All the while, every one knew that other work was going on also. The

whole fabric of the country's seemingly undisturbed routine was

threaded with noiseless invisible currents of preparation, the sense

of them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is in

the balminess of a perfect afternoon. Paris counted the minutes till

the evening papers came.

They said little or nothing except what every one was already

declaring all over the country. "We don't want war--_mais it faut

que cela finisse!_" "This kind of thing has got to stop": that was

the only phase one heard. If diplomacy could still arrest the war,

so much the better: no one in France wanted it. All who spent the

first days of August in Paris will testify to the agreement of

feeling on that point. But if war had to come, the country, and

every heart in it, was ready.

At the dressmaker's, the next morning, the tired fitters were

preparing to leave for their usual holiday. They looked pale and

anxious--decidedly, there was a new weight of apprehension in the

air. And in the rue Royale, at the corner of the Place de la

Concorde, a few people had stopped to look at a little strip of

white paper against the wall of the Ministere de la Marine. "General

mobilization" they read--and an armed nation knows what that means.

But the group about the paper was small and quiet. Passers by read

the notice and went on. There were no cheers, no gesticulations: the

dramatic sense of the race had already told them that the event was

too great to be dramatized. Like a monstrous landslide it had fallen

across the path of an orderly laborious nation, disrupting its

routine, annihilating its industries, rending families apart, and

burying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfully

wrought machinery of civilization...

That evening, in a restaurant of the rue Royale, we sat at a table

in one of the open windows, abreast with the street, and saw the

strange new crowds stream by. In an instant we were being shown what

mobilization was--a huge break in the normal flow of traffic, like

the sudden rupture of a dyke. The street was flooded by the torrent

of people sweeping past us to the various railway stations. All were

on foot, and carrying their luggage; for since dawn every cab and

taxi and motor--omnibus had disappeared. The War Office had thrown

out its drag-net and caught them all in. The crowd that passed our

window was chiefly composed of conscripts, the _mobilisables_ of the

first day, who were on the way to the station accompanied by their

families and friends; but among them were little clusters of

bewildered tourists, labouring along with bags and bundles, and

watching their luggage pushed before them on hand-carts--puzzled

inarticulate waifs caught in the cross-tides racing to a maelstrom.

In the restaurant, the befrogged and red-coated band poured out

patriotic music, and the intervals between the courses that so few

waiters were left to serve were broken by the ever-recurring

obligation to stand up for the Marseillaise, to stand up for God

Save the King, to stand up for the Russian National Anthem, to stand

up again for the Marseillaise. "_Et dire que ce sont des Hongrois

qui jouent tout cela!"_ a humourist remarked from the pavement.

As the evening wore on and the crowd about our window thickened, the

loiterers outside began to join in the war-songs. "_Allons, debout!_

"--and the loyal round begins again. "La chanson du depart" is a

frequent demand; and the chorus of spectators chimes in roundly. A

sort of quiet humour was the note of the street. Down the rue

Royale, toward the Madeleine, the bands of other restaurants were

attracting other throngs, and martial refrains were strung along the

Boulevard like its garlands of arc-lights. It was a night of singing

and acclamations, not boisterous, but gallant and determined. It was

Paris _badauderie_ at its best.

Meanwhile, beyond the fringe of idlers the steady stream of

conscripts still poured along. Wives and families trudged beside

them, carrying all kinds of odd improvised bags and bundles. The

impression disengaging itself from all this superficial confusion

was that of a cheerful steadiness of spirit. The faces ceaselessly

streaming by were serious but not sad; nor was there any air of

bewilderment--the stare of driven cattle. All these lads and young

men seemed to know what they were about and why they were about it.

The youngest of them looked suddenly grown up and responsible; they

understood their stake in the job, and accepted it.

The next day the army of midsummer travel was immobilized to let the

other army move. No more wild rushes to the station, no more bribing

of concierges, vain quests for invisible cabs, haggard hours of

waiting in the queue at Cook's. No train stirred except to carry

soldiers, and the civilians who had not bribed and jammed their way

into a cranny of the thronged carriages leaving the first night

could only creep back through the hot streets to their hotel and

wait. Back they went, disappointed yet half-relieved, to the

resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants,

motionless lifts: to the queer disjointed life of fashionable hotels

suddenly reduced to the intimacies and make-shift of a Latin

Quarter _pension._ Meanwhile it was strange to watch the gradual

paralysis of the city. As the motors, taxis, cabs and vans had

vanished from the streets, so the lively little steamers had left

the Seine. The canal-boats too were gone, or lay motionless: loading

and unloading had ceased. Every great architectural opening framed

an emptiness; all the endless avenues stretched away to desert

distances. In the parks and gardens no one raked the paths or

trimmed the borders. The fountains slept in their basins, the

worried sparrows fluttered unfed, and vague dogs, shaken out of

their daily habits, roamed unquietly, looking for familiar eyes.

Paris, so intensely conscious yet so strangely entranced, seemed to

have had _curare_ injected into all her veins.

The next day--the 2nd of August--from the terrace of the Hotel

de Crillon one looked down on a first faint stir of returning life.

Now and then a taxi-cab or a private motor crossed the Place de la

Concorde, carrying soldiers to the stations. Other conscripts, in

detachments, tramped by on foot with bags and banners. One

detachment stopped before the black-veiled statue of Strasbourg and

laid a garland at her feet. In ordinary times this demonstration

would at once have attracted a crowd; but at the very moment when it

might have been expected to provoke a patriotic outburst it excited

no more attention than if one of the soldiers had turned aside to

give a penny to a beggar. The people crossing the square did not

even stop to look. The meaning of this apparent indifference was

obvious. When an armed nation mobilizes, everybody is busy, and busy

in a definite and pressing way. It is not only the fighters that

mobilize: those who stay behind must do the same. For each French

household, for each individual man or woman in France, war means a

complete reorganization of life. The detachment of conscripts,

unnoticed, paid their tribute to the Cause and passed on...

Looked back on from these sterner months those early days in Paris,

in their setting of grave architecture and summer skies, wear the

light of the ideal and the abstract. The sudden flaming up of

national life, the abeyance of every small and mean preoccupation,

cleared the moral air as the streets had been cleared, and made the

spectator feel as though he were reading a great poem on War rather

than facing its realities.

Something of this sense of exaltation seemed to penetrate the

throngs who streamed up and down the Boulevards till late into the

night. All wheeled traffic had ceased, except that of the rare

taxi-cabs impressed to carry conscripts to the stations; and the

middle of the Boulevards was as thronged with foot-passengers as an

Italian market-place on a Sunday morning. The vast tide swayed up

and down at a slow pace, breaking now and then to make room for one

of the volunteer "legions" which were forming at every corner:

Italian, Roumanian, South American, North American, each headed by

its national flag and hailed with cheering as it passed. But even

the cheers were sober: Paris was not to be shaken out of her

self-imposed serenity. One felt something nobly conscious and

voluntary in the mood of this quiet multitude. Yet it was a mixed

throng, made up of every class, from the scum of the Exterior

Boulevards to the cream of the fashionable restaurants. These

people, only two days ago, had been leading a thousand different

lives, in indifference or in antagonism to each other, as alien as

enemies across a frontier: now workers and idlers, thieves, beggars,

saints, poets, drabs and sharpers, genuine people and showy shams,

were all bumping up against each other in an instinctive community

of emotion. The "people," luckily, predominated; the faces of

workers look best in such a crowd, and there were thousands of them,

each illuminated and singled out by its magnesium-flash of passion.

I remember especially the steady-browed faces of the women; and also

the small but significant fact that every one of them had remembered

to bring her dog. The biggest of these amiable companions had to

take their chance of seeing what they could through the forest of

human legs; but every one that was portable was snugly lodged in the

bend of an elbow, and from this safe perch scores and scores of

small serious muzzles, blunt or sharp, smooth or woolly, brown or

grey or white or black or brindled, looked out on the scene with the

quiet awareness of the Paris dog. It was certainly a good sign that

they had not been forgotten that night.