An Unknown Paris in the Night and Rain
It was Sunday morning, the bells were ringing to church, and I was
strolling in the gardens of the Tuileries. A bright morning sun was
drying the dewy lawns and the wet marble bodies of the gods and
athletes, the leaves on the trees were falling, and the French autumn,
so slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun. At the end of the
mighty vista of the Champs Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe rose, brown and
vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an aeroplane was
maneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a moving speck of white and
silver in the soft, September blue. From a near-by Punch and Judy show
the laughter of little children floated down the garden in outbursts of
treble shrillness. "Villain, monster, scoundrel," squeaked a voice.
Flopped across the base of the stage, the arms hanging downwards, was a
prostrate doll which a fine manikin in a Zouave's uniform belabored with
a stick; suddenly it stirred, and, with a comic effect, lifted its
puzzled, wooden head to the laughing children. Beneath a little Prussian
helmet was the head of William of Germany, caricatured with Parisian
skill into a scowling, green fellow with a monster black mustache turned
up to his eyes. "Lie down!" cried the Zouave doll imperiously. "Here is
a love pat for thee from a French Zouave, my big Boche." And he struck
him down again with his staff.
Soldiers walked in the garden,--permissionnaires (men on furlough) out
for an airing with their rejoicing families, smart young English
subalterns, and rosy-fleshed, golden-haired Flemings of the type that
Rubens drew. But neither their presence nor the sight of an occasional
mutilé (soldier who has lost a limb), pathetically clumsy on his new
crutches, quite sent home the presence of the war. The normal life of
the city was powerful enough to engulf the disturbance, the theaters
were open, there were the same crowds on the boulevards, and the same
gossipy spectators in the sidewalk cafés. After a year of war the
Parisians were accustomed to soldiers, cripples, and people in mourning.
The strongest effect of the war was more subtle of definition, it was a
change in the temper of the city. Since the outbreak of the war, the
sham Paris that was "Gay Paree" had disappeared, and the real Paris, the
Paris of tragic memories and great men, had taken its place. An old
Parisian explained the change to me in saying, "Paris has become more
French." Deprived of the foreigner, the city adapted itself to a taste
more Gallic; faced with the realities of war, it exchanged its
artificiality for that sober reasonableness which is the normal attitude
of the nation.
At noon I left the garden and strolled down the Champs Élysées to the
Porte Maillot. The great salesrooms of the German motor-car dealers had
been given by the Government to a number of military charities who had
covered the trade signs with swathes and rosettes of their national
colors. Under the banner of the Belgians, in the quondam hop of the
Mercedes, was an exhibition of leather knickknacks, baskets, and dolls
made by the blind and mutilated soldiers. The articles--children's toys
for the most part, dwarfs that rolled over and over on a set of parallel
bars, Alsatian lasses with flaxen hair, and gay tops--were exposed on a
row of tables a few feet back from the window. By the Porte Maillot,
some of the iron saw-horses with sharpened points, which had formed part
of the barricade built there in the days of the Great Retreat, lay, a
villainous, rusty heap, in a grassy ditch of the city wall; a few stumps
of the trees that had been then cut down were still visible, and from a
railroad tie embedded in the sidewalk hung six links of a massive chain.
Through this forgotten flotsam on the great shore of the war, the quiet
crowds went in and out of the Maillot entrance to the Bois de Boulogne.
There was a sense of order and security in the air. I took a seat on the
terrace of a little restaurant. The garçon was a small man in the
fifties, inclined to corpulence, with a large head, large, blue-gray
eyes, purplish lips, and blue-black hair cut pompadour. As we watched
the orderly, Sunday crowds going to the great park, we fell into
conversation about the calmness of Paris. "Yes, it is calm," he said;
"we are all waiting (nous attendons). We know that the victory will be
ours at the finish. But all we can do is to wait. I have two sons at the
front." He had struck the keynote. Paris is calmly waiting--waiting for
the end of the war, for victory, for the return of her children.
Yet in this great, calm city, with its vaporous browns and slaty blues,
and its characteristic acrid smell of gasoline fumes, was another Paris,
a terrible Paris, which I was that night to see. Early in the afternoon
a dull haze of leaden clouds rose in the southwest. It began to rain.
In a great garret of the hospital, under a high French roof, was the
dormitory of the volunteers attached to the Paris Ambulance Section. At
night, this great space was lit by only one light, a battered electric
reading-lamp standing on a kind of laboratory table in the center of the
floor, and window curtains of dark-blue cambric, waving mysteriously in
the night wind, were supposed to hide even this glimmer from the eyes of
raiding Zeppelins. Looking down, early in the evening, into the great
quadrangle of the institution, one saw the windows of the opposite wing
veiled with this mysterious blue, and heard all the feverish unrest of a
hospital, the steps on the tiled corridors, the running of water in the
bathroom taps, the hard clatter of surgical vessels, and sometimes the
cry of a patient having a painful wound dressed. But late at night the
confused murmur of the battle between life and death had subsided, the
lights in the wards were extinguished, and only the candle of the night
nurse, seen behind a screen, and the stertorous breathing of the many
sleepers, brought back the consciousness of human life. I have often
looked into the wards as I returned from night calls to the station
where we received the wounded, and been conscious, as I peered silently
into that flickering obscurity, of the vague unrest of sleepers, of the
various attitudes assumed, the arms outstretched, the upturned throats,
and felt, too, in the still room, the mystic presence of the Angel of
Pain.
It was late at night, and I stood looking out of my window over the
roofs of Neuilly to the great, darkened city just beyond. From somewhere
along the tracks of the "Little Belt" railway came a series of piercing
shrieks from a locomotive whistle. It was raining hard, drumming on the
slate roof of the dormitory, and somewhere below a gutter gurgled
foolishly. Far away in the corridor a gleam of yellow light shone from
the open door of an isolation room where a nurse was watching by a
patient dying of gangrene. Two comrades who had been to the movies at
the Gaumont Palace near the Place Clichy began to talk in sibilant
whispers of the evening's entertainment, and one of them said, "That war
film was a corker; did you spot the big cuss throwing the grenades?"
"Yuh, damn good," answered the other pulling his shirt over his head. It
was a strange crew that inhabited these quarters; there were idealists,
dreamers, men out of work, simple rascals and adventurers of all kinds.
To my right slept a big, young Westerner, from some totally unknown
college in Idaho, who was a humanitarian enthusiast to the point of
imbecility, and to the left a middle-aged rogue who indulged in secret
debauches of alcohol and water he cajoled from the hospital orderlies.
Yet this obscure and motley community was America's contribution to
France. I fell asleep.
"Up, birds!"
The lieutenant of the Paris Section, a mining engineer with a
picturesque vocabulary of Nevadan profanity, was standing in his pajama
trousers at the head of the room, holding a lantern in his hand. "Up,
birds!" he called again. "Call's come in for Lah Chapelle." There were
uneasy movements under the blankets, inmates of adjoining beds began to
talk to each other, and some lit their bedside candles. The chief went
down both sides of the dormitory, flashing his lantern before each bed,
ragging the sleepy. "Get up, So-and-So. Well, I must say, Pete, you have
a hell of a nerve." There were glimpses of candle flames, bare bodies
shivering in the damp cold, and men sitting on beds, winding on their
puttees. "Gee! listen to it rain," said somebody. "What time is it?"
"Twenty minutes past two." Soon the humming and drumming of the motors
in the yard sounded through the roaring of the downpour.
Down in the yard I found Oiler, my orderly, and our little Ford
ambulance, number fifty-three. One electric light, of that sickly yellow
color universal in France, was burning over the principal entrance to
the hospital, just giving us light enough to see our way out of the
gates. Down the narrow, dark Boulevard Inkerman we turned, and then out
on to a great street which led into the "outer" boulevard of De
Batignolles and Clichy. To that darkness with which the city, in fear of
raiding aircraft, has hidden itself, was added the continuous, pouring
rain. In the light of our lamps, the wet, golden trees of the black,
silent boulevards shone strangely, and the illuminated advertising
kiosks which we passed, one after the other at the corners of great
streets, stood lonely and drenched, in the swift, white touch of our
radiance. Black and shiny, the asphalt roadway appeared to go on in a
straight line forever and forever.
Neither in residential, suburban Neuilly nor in deserted Montmartre was
there a light to be seen, but when we drew into the working quarter of
La Chapelle, lights appeared in the windows, as if some toiler of the
night was expected home or starting for his labor, and vague forms,
battling with the rain or in refuge under the awning of a café, were now
and then visible. From the end of the great, mean rue de La Chapelle the
sounds of the unrest of the railroad yards began to be heard, for this
street leads to the freight-houses near the fortifications. Our
objective was a great freight station which the Government, some months
before, had turned into a receiving-post for the wounded; it lay on the
edge of the yard, some distance in from the street, behind a huddle of
smaller sheds and outbuildings. To our surprise the rue de La Chapelle
was strewn with ambulances rushing from the station, and along two sides
of the great yard, where the merchandise trucks had formerly turned in,
six or seven hundred more ambulances were waiting. We turned out of the
dark, rain-swept city into this hurly-burly of shouts, snorting of
engines, clashing of gears, and whining of brakes, illuminated with a
thousand intermeshing beams of headlights across whose brilliance the
rain fell in sloping, liquid rods. "Quick, a small car this way!" cried
some one in an authoritative tone, and number fifty-three ran up an
inclined plane into the enormous shed which had been reserved for the
loading of the wounded into the ambulances.
We entered a great, high, white-washed, warehouse kind of place, about
four hundred feet long by four hundred feet wide, built of wood
evidently years before. In the middle of this shed was an open space,
and along the walls were rows of ambulances. Brancardiers
(stretcher-bearers; from brancard, a stretcher) were loading wounded
into these cars, and as soon as one car was filled, it would go out of
the hall and another would take its place. There was an infernal din;
the place smelled like a stuffy garage, and was full of blue gasoline
fumes; and across this hurly-burly, which was increasing every minute,
were carried the wounded, often nothing but human bundles of dirty blue
cloth and fouled bandages. Every one of these wounded soldiers was
saturated with mud, a gray-white mud that clung moistly to their
overcoats, or, fully dry, colored every part of the uniform with its
powder. One saw men that appeared to have rolled over and over in a
puddle bath of this whitish mud, and sometimes there was seen a sinister
mixture of blood and mire. There is nothing romantic about a wounded
soldier, for his condition brings a special emphasis on our human
relation to ordinary meat. Dirty, exhausted, unshaven, smelling of the
trenches, of his wounds, and of the antiseptics on his wounds, the
soldier comes from the train a sight for which only the great heart of
Francis of Assisi could have adequate pity.
Oiler and I went through an opening in a canvas partition into that part
of the great shed where the wounded were being unloaded from the trains.
In width, this part measured four hundred feet, but in length it ran to
eight hundred. In two rows of six each, separated by an aisle about
eight feet wide, were twelve little houses, about forty feet square,
built of stucco, each one painted a different color. The woodwork of the
exterior was displayed through the plaster in the Elizabethan fashion,
and the little sheds were clean, solidly built, and solidly roofed. In
one of these constructions was the bureau of the staff which assigned
the wounded to the hospitals, in another was a fully equipped
operating-room, and in the others, rows of stretcher-horses, twenty-five
to a side, on which the wounded were laid until a hospital number had
been assigned them. A slip, with these hospital numbers on it, the names
of the patients, and the color of the little house in which they were to
be found, was then given to the chauffeur of an ambulance, who, with
this slip in hand and followed by a number of stretcher-bearers,
immediately gathered his patients. A specimen slip might run thus--"To
Hospital 32, avenue de Iéna, Paul Chaubard, red barraque, Jules Adamy,
green barraque, and Alphonse Fort, ochre barraque."
To give a French touch to the scene, this great space, rapidly filling
with human beings in an appalling state of misery, as the aftermath of
the offensive broke on us, was decorated with evergreen trees and shrubs
so that the effect was that of an indoor fair or exhibition; you felt as
if you might get samples of something at each barraque, as the French
termed the little houses. To the side of these there was a platform, and
a sunken track running along the wall, and behind, a great open space
set with benches for those of the wounded able to walk. Some fifty
great, cylindrical braziers, which added a strange bit of rosy, fiery
color to the scene, warmed this space. When the wounded had begun to
arrive at about midnight, a regiment of Zouaves was at hand to help the
regular stretcher-bearers; these Zouaves were all young, "husky" men
dressed in the baggy red trousers and short blue jacket of their classic
uniform, and their strength was in as much of a contrast to the weakness
of those whom they handled as their gay uniform was in contrast to the
miry, horizon blue of the combatants. There was something grotesque in
seeing two of these powerful fellows carrying to the wagons a dirty blue
bundle of a human being.
With a piercing shriek, that cut like a gash through the uproar of the
ambulance engines, a sanitary train, the seventh since midnight, came
into the station, and so smoothly did it run by, its floors on a level
with the main floor, that it seemed an illusion, like a stage train. On
the platform stood some Zouaves waiting to unload the passengers, while
others cleared the barraques and helped the feeble to the ambulances.
There was a steady line of stretchers going out, yet the station was so
full that hardly a bit of the vast floor space was unoccupied. One
walked down a narrow path between a sea of bandaged bodies. Shouldering
what baggage they had, those able to walk plodded in a strange, slow
tempo to the waiting automobiles. All by themselves were about a hundred
poor, ragged Germans, wounded prisoners, brothers of the French in this
terrible fraternity of pain.
About four or five hundred assis (those able to sit up) were waiting on
benches at the end of the hall. Huddled round the rosy, flickering
braziers, they sat profoundly silent in the storm and din that moved
about them, rarely conversing with each other. I imagine that the
stupefaction, which is the physiological reaction of an intense
emotional and muscular effort, had not yet worn away. There were fine
heads here and there. Forgetful of his shattered arm, an old fellow,
with the face of Henri Quatre, eagle nose, beard, and all, sat with his
head sunken on his chest in mournful contemplation, and a fine-looking,
black-haired, dragoon kind of youth with the wildest of eyes clung like
grim death to a German helmet. The same expression of resigned fatalism
was common to all.
Sometimes the chauffeurs who were waiting for their clients got a chance
to talk to one of the soldiers. Eager for news, they clustered round the
wounded man, bombarding him with questions.
"Are the Boches retreating?"
"When did it begin?"
"Just where is the attack located?"
"Are things going well for us?"
The soldier, a big young fellow with a tanned face, somewhat pale from
the shock of a ripped-up forearm, answered the questions good-naturedly,
though the struggle had been on so great a scale that he could only tell
about his own hundred feet of trench. Indeed the substance of his
information was that there had been a terrible bombardment of the German
lines, and then an attack by the French which was still in progress.
"Are we going to break clear through the lines?"
The soldier shrugged his shoulders. "They hope to," he replied.
Just beyond us, in one of the thousand stretchers on the floor, a small
bearded man had died. With his left leg and groin swathed in bandages,
he lay flat on his back, his mouth open, muddy, dirty, and dead. From
time to time the living on each side stole curious, timid glances at
him. Then, suddenly, some one noticed the body, and two
stretcher-bearers carried it away, and two more brought a living man
there in its place.
The turmoil continued to increase. At least a thousand motor-ambulances,
mobilized from all over the region of Paris, were now on hand to carry
away the human wreckage of the great offensive. Ignorant of the ghastly
army at its doors, Paris slept. The rain continued to fall heavily.
"Eh la, comrade."
A soldier in the late thirties, with a pale, refined face, hailed me
from his stretcher.
"You speak French?"
I nodded.
"I am going to ask you to do me a favor--write to my wife who is here in
Paris, and tell her that I am safe and shall let her know at once what
hospital I am sent to. I shall be very grateful."
He let his shoulders sink to the stretcher again and I saw him now and
then looking for me in the crowd. Catching my eye, he smiled.
A train full of Algerian troops came puffing into the station, the
uproar hardly rising above the general hubbub. The passengers who were
able to walk got out first, some limping, some walking firmly with a
splendid Eastern dignity. These men were Arabs and Moors from Algeria
and Tunisia, who had enlisted in the colonial armies. There was a great
diversity of size and racial type among them, some being splendid, big
men of the type one imagines Othello to have been, some chunkier and
more bullet-headed, and others tall and lean with interesting aquiline
features. I fancy that the shorter, rounder-skulled ones were those with
a dash of black blood. The uniform, of khaki-colored woolen, consisted
of a simple, short-waisted jacket, big baggy trousers, puttees, and a
red fez or a steel helmet with the lunar crescent and "R.F." for its
device. We heard rumors about their having attacked a village. Advancing
in the same curious tempo as the French, they passed to the braziers and
the wooden benches. Last of all from the train, holding his bandaged arm
against his chest, a native corporal with the features of a desert
tribesman advanced with superb, unconscious stateliness. As the
Algerians sat round the braziers, their uniforms and brown skins
presented a contrast to the pallor of the French in their bedraggled
blue, but there was a marked similarity of facial expression. A certain
racial odor rose from the Orientals.
My first assignment, two Algerians and two Frenchmen, took me to an
ancient Catholic high school which had just been improvised into a
hospital for the Oriental troops. It lay, dirty, lonely, and grim, just
to one side of a great street on the edge of Paris, and had not been
occupied since its seizure by the State. Turning in through an enormous
door, lit by a gas globe flaring and flickering in the torrents of rain,
we found ourselves in an enormous, dark courtyard, where a half-dozen
ambulances were already waiting to discharge their clients. Along one
wall there was a flight of steps, and from somewhere beyond the door at
the end of this stair shone the faintest glow of yellow light.
It came from the door of a long-disused schoolroom, now turned into the
receiving-hall of this strange hospital. The big, high room was lit by
one light only, a kerosene hand lamp standing on the teacher's desk, and
so smoked was the chimney that the wick gave hardly more light than a
candle. There was just enough illumination to see about thirty Algerians
sitting at the school desks, their big bodies crammed into the little
seats, and to distinguish others lying in stretchers here and there upon
the floor. At the teacher's table a little French adjutant with a trim,
black mustache and a soldier interpreter were trying to discover the
identity of their visitors.
"Number 2215," (numéro deux mille deux cent quinze), the officer cried;
and the interpreter, leaning over the adjutant's shoulder to read the
name, shouted, "Méhémet Ali."
There was no answer, and the Algerians looked round at each other, for
all the world like children in a school. It was very curious to see
these dark, heavy, wild faces bent over these disused desks.
"Number 2168" (numéro deux mille cent soixante huit), cried the
adjutant.
"Abdullah Taleb," cried the interpreter.
"Moi," answered a voice from a stretcher in the shadows of the floor.
"Take him to room six," said the adjutant, indicating the speaker to a
pair of stretcher-bearers. In the quieter pauses the rain was heard
beating on the panes.
There are certain streets in Paris, equally unknown to tourist and
Parisian--obscure, narrow, cobble-stoned lanes, lined by walls
concealing little orchards and gardens. So provincial is their
atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to believe
one's self on the fringe of an old town, just where little bourgeois
villas begin to overlook the fields; but to consider one's self just
beyond the heart of Paris is almost incredible. Down such a street, in a
great garden, lay the institution to which our two Frenchmen were
assigned. We had a hard time finding it in the night and rain, but at
length, discovering the concierge's bell, we sent a vigorous peal
clanging through the darkness. Oiler lifted the canvas flap of the
ambulance to see about our patients.
"All right in there, boys?"
"Yes," answered a voice.
"Not cold?"
"Non. Are we at the hospital?"
"Yes; we are trying to wake up the concierge."
There was a sound of a key in a lock, and a small, dark woman opened the
door. She was somewhat spinstery in type, her thin, black hair was
neatly parted in the middle, and her face was shrewd, but not unkindly.
"Deux blessés (two wounded), madame," said I.
The woman pulled a wire loop inside the door, and a far-off bell
tinkled.
"Come in," she said. "The porter will be here immediately."
We stepped into a little room with a kind of English look to it, and a
carbon print of the Sistine Madonna on the wall.
"Are they seriously wounded?" she asked.
"I cannot say."
A sound of shuffling, slippered feet was heard, and the porter, a small,
beefy, gray-haired man in the fifties, wearing a pair of rubber boots,
and a rain-coat over a woolen night-dress, came into the room.
"Two wounded have arrived," said the lady. "You are to help these
messieurs get out the stretchers."
The porter looked out of the door at the tail-light of the ambulance,
glowing red behind its curtain of rain.
"Mon Dieu, what a deluge!" he exclaimed, and followed us forth. With an
"Easy there," and "Lift now," we soon had both of our clients out of the
ambulance and indoors. They lay on the floor of the odd, stiff, little
room, strange intruders of its primness; the first, a big, heavy,
stolid, young peasant with enormous, flat feet, and the second a small,
nervous, city lad, with his hair in a bang and bright, uneasy eyes. The
mud-stained blue of the uniforms seemed very strange, indeed, beside the
Victorian furniture upholstered in worn, cherry-red plush. A middle-aged
servant--a big-boned, docile-looking kind of creature, probably the
porter's wife--entered, followed by two other women, the last two
wearing the same cut of prim black waist and skirt, and the same pattern
of white wristlets and collar. We then carried the two soldiers upstairs
to a back room, where the old servant had filled a kind of enamel
dishpan with soapy water. Very gently and deftly the beefy old porter
and his wife took off the fouled, blood-stained uniforms of the two
fighting men, and washed their bodies, while she who had opened the door
stood by and superintended all. The feverish, bright-eyed fellow seemed
to be getting weaker, but the big peasant conversed with the old woman
in a low, steady tone, and told her that there had been a big action.
When Oiler and I came downstairs, two little glasses of sherry and a
plate of biscuits were hospitably waiting for us. There was something
distinctly English in the atmosphere of the room and in the demeanor of
the two prim ladies who stood by. It roused my curiosity. Finally one of
them said:--
"Are you English, gentlemen?"
"No," we replied; "Americans."
"I thought you might be English," she replied in that language, which
she spoke very clearly and fluently. "Both of us have been many years in
England. We are French Protestant deaconesses, and this is our home. It
is not a hospital. But when the call for more accommodations for the
wounded came in, we got ready our two best rooms. The soldiers upstairs
are our first visitors."
The old porter came uneasily down the stair. "Mademoiselle Pierre says
that the doctor must come at once," he murmured, "the little fellow (le
petit) is not doing well."
We thanked the ladies gratefully for the refreshment, for we were cold
and soaked to the skin. Then we went out again to the ambulance and the
rain. A faint pallor of dawn was just beginning. Later in the morning, I
saw a copy of the "Matin" attached to a kiosk; it said something about
"Grande Victoire."
Thus did the great offensive in Champagne come to the city of Paris,
bringing twenty thousand men a day to the station of La Chapelle. For
three days and nights the Americans and all the other ambulance squads
drove continuously. It was a terrible phase of the conflict to see, but
he who neither sees nor understands it cannot realize the soul of the
war. Later, at the trenches, I saw phases of the war that were
spiritual, heroic, and close to the divine, but this phase was, in its
essence, profoundly animal.