"NACH PARIS!"
Von Kluck and I had a race to see who would reach Paris first. It was
close. But I won. Lots of my friends thought then and since that I was
foolish to take my children back to Paris at such a time. An American
woman came to Ty Coz, my little summer cottage at Saint-Jean-du-Doigt in
Finistère, to remonstrate with me.
"You must be crazy," she said in her most complimentary tone, "to take
those three children back to Paris now. The Germans are certainly going
to capture Paris, and if they don't do it right away, they'll bombard
the city until it surrenders. My dear Mrs. Gibbons, surely you read the
papers and you see what awful things the Germans are doing in Belgium.
Paris has no chance against their big guns. And they will cut the
railways. You will have no milk, no vegetables. And here you are in
Brittany, where they probably will not come, and if they do, you can get
off to England by sea."
I did not argue. It would have been foolish to tell her that the Germans
would not take Paris. I was no prophet, and denying a danger is not
preventing it. Despite the tigress instinct of every mother to protect
her own, I simply could not feel that to go home was the wrong thing to
do. Herbert wrote and telegraphed approving my desire to return. As my
husband could not leave Paris to come to us, it was manifestly up to us
to go to him. We were more concerned about the possibility of being cut
off from each other than about what the Germans might do to us. I had
one advantage in making up my mind over other women around me. War and
sieges and bombardments did not loom up when I read about the march
through Belgium with the same sense of awfulness as to my neighbors. I
knew that things look worse from a distance than they are on the spot. I
remembered how normally we lived in the midst of massacre in Tarsus and
when the Bulgarians were attacking Constantinople.
The removal of the Government to Bordeaux did not deter me at the last
minute. It did not seem to me an indication that the game was up, but
rather the decision to profit by experience of earlier wars and not
stake the whole war upon the defense of the capital. It was getting cold
at the seashore. I was anxious to direct myself the moving into the new
apartment we had taken. Yvonne, my cook, and Dorothy, my English nurse,
were as eager as I to get back to town. We just didn't let the Germans
bother us! The trunks and baby-beds were loaded in one two-wheeled cart
and the kiddies on hay in another. We grown-ups bicycled along behind
the seventeen kilometres to Morlaix. The Brest _rapide_ carried scarcely
any civilians. We broke in on the seclusion of a colonel sitting alone
in a compartment.
"I pity you, sir," I said.
"Why?" He smiled and threw away his newspaper. That was promising. When
a man puts down his newspaper for me, I know he is interesting. So few
men do. My husband doesn't always. I needed to make friends with the
officer. During the all night journey I wanted to manoeuvre for open
windows, and you cannot do that in France unless you are on the best of
terms with your fellow-travellers.
"Why do I pity you? Because you are invaded by three babies and three
grown-ups when you hoped to keep the compartment for yourself. But you
may not be sorry when you see the supper you are going to help eat--two
roast chickens, salad sandwiches, pears just picked this morning in my
garden, and the best of cider. There is plenty of _café au lait_ in
thermos bottles for breakfast."
The colonel's face brightened. Dining-cars had been suppressed since the
day of the mobilization. He assured me that a soldier did not mind
company at night and always liked food. But he was a bit puzzled about
my breakfast invitation. "Surely you are not going to Paris with these
children," he said. "Are you not afraid?"
"Not as long as there is the French army between my children and the
enemy," I answered.
The colonel leaned back in the corner and shut his eyes. Tears rolled
down his cheeks. It was a long time before he spoke, and all he said
was, "_Merci_! I shall tell that to my regiment to-morrow."
"Monsieur," I insisted, "what I said was nothing. All the women in
France feel as I do. We have got to feel that way. You have the
strength--we must have the faith. If Paris were not my home, I should
not go. But it is my home, and this is the week I always return from the
shore."
More than one hysterical person wrote wonderful and lurid accounts of
Paris in the autumn of 1914. There was an exodus of _froussards_ in the
first days of September and during the whole month refugees poured into
the city. But the great mass of the population was not affected by the
fright of a few. I arrived too late for the most critical days. My
husband assured me that there had been no panic except in the
imagination of certain individuals and officials. I found that very few
of my friends had run away. The _Herald_ appeared every morning, and
Percy Mitchell's voice over the telephone from the Rue du Louvre was
cheery and optimistic. There was no funk in the American colony. Most of
the people I knew were helping get the Ambulance at Neuilly started or
were launching _œuvres_ of their own. I seized on the opening for
layette work immediately, and I started afternoon sewing for Russian and
Polish girls, too, in one of my servants' rooms. I am a quarrelsome
wretch when I get on committees with other women. So I did the
_layettes_ alone in my studio and had only the help of another Bryn Mawr
girl, who lived in Paris, in the _ouvroir_--as gatherings for sewing
were called.
But the panic? The sense of danger? Suspense and worry over the fighting
between the Marne and Aisne? Dread of air raids? I saw none of this. I
heard nothing in the conversation of my friends or servants or
tradespeople to make me feel Paris was in a ferment of excitement or
fear. The anxiety was for loved ones fighting "out there"; the
depression was the pall of death over us. No music, no singing, theatres
closed, cafés shut up at eight o'clock, dark streets--these were the
abnormal features of Paris life in the early months of the war. Whoever
writes or talks in a way to make it appear that staying in Paris was a
test of personal courage is a sorry impostor. There was no danger. None
ever thought of danger.
Nor did we have the discomforts and annoyances and deprivations during
the early period of the war that came to us later. Food was abundant and
prices did not go up. There was plenty of labor. You could get things
done without the exhausting hunt for workers with a willing spirit and
knowledge of their job that we have to make now. In the month of the
Battle of the Marne we moved into 120 Boulevard du Montparnasse. It was
a new house, and we had everything to think of, plumbing, heating,
fixtures, wiring for bells and lights, painting, paper-hanging,
carpentering. All was done without a hitch. The moving-vans worked as in
peace times. Things came by freight from Brittany and Normandy--thirty
boxes in all--and were delivered to us without delay just as if there
were no war. It seems incredible in retrospect that France and Paris
should have been normal (after the first confusion of the mobilization)
despite the terrific struggle for existence within hearing distance. But
it was so. I want to put down my testimony as a housewife and mother of
children in Paris that we lived normally and had no dangers or
difficulties to contend with when the Germans were trying to finish up
the war in a hurry.
On the second Sunday of October we had our first visit from a group of
airplanes. Few bombs were dropped. Herbert and I were walking outside
the fortifications near the Porte d'Orléans when they arrived. We
thought of our kiddies, playing in the Luxembourg, and hurried there.
The children and Dorothy described graphically how two planes had been
over the Garden. But their feeling was wholly curiosity. At that time
Parisians did not realize the danger of air raids.
One Sunday Herbert and I went chestnutting. Despite the swarms of
excursionists around Paris, there are lots of places to pick up on the
road all the chestnuts you can carry. We walked from Saint-Cyr across
country, skirting Versailles, to Marly. With heavy pockets, knotted
kerchief bundles, and the beginning of stiffness in our backs, we
stopped for lunch at a little country hostelry whose _cave_ still has a
big stock of Chambertin of golden years. The critic and I are agreed
upon the wisdom of censoring the name I unthinkingly put in the first
draft of this chapter. Why spoil a good thing? Life is short--and so are
stocks of Chambertin. And there are so many roads and so many hostelries
between Saint-Cyr and Saint-Germain-en-Laye that the little I have said
is a challenge to your love of Burgundy.
Madame told us how history did not repeat itself until the end of the
story. What starts the same way does not always end the same way. We
hope German professors of history will impress this truth upon the next
generation of their close-cropped, bullet-headed students. They are at
liberty to use this illustration if they want. Why limit their Paris
vistas to the provoking sight of the Tour Eiffel in the distance?
"In Soixante-Dix," said Madame, flipping teamsters' crumbs off our table
with a skilful swing of her _serviette_, "I saw my father bury our wines
out there in the garden. It took several days, and he had only my
brother and me to help him. I remember how he mumbled and shook his head
over the possible effect of disturbing the good _crus_. 'They will
never be the same again,' he said mournfully. Much good it did him! We
had our work for nothing. The Germans came. Right where you are sitting,
_M'sieu-dame_, the brutes thumped on the table and called for the best
in the cellar. My father said he had no wine. They went to the cave.
Empty. Then the officer laughed till the tears rolled down his cheeks.
He sat in a chair--sprawled in a chair that cracked under his
swinging--smacked his thighs, and when he could speak, he told his men
to go out into the garden. With their picks and shovels they unearthed
all--all, _M'sieu-dame_.
"So this time I remembered--and I thought hard. My husband was off the
fourth day of the mobilization. Even if I had help, would not the garden
_cache_ a second time be foolish? And the old _crus_ ought not to be
shaken--you are going to taste my Chambertin, and you will agree that it
ought not to risk being shaken. It really ought not. What was I to do?
When the Germans come, will they know the difference? I asked myself. So
I took _vin ordinaire_. I put it in bottles. I sealed it red. I worked
two days to put it on the outer racks and the under racks with the good
wine between. Then I cobwebbed it and moistened it with dust. I built a
fire to dry it. If the Germans were in a hurry they would take the top.
If they had leisure, they would fish in the bottom rows.
"But the Germans never came. I had my work a second time for nothing.
Do you think, _M'sieu-dame_, they will be fooled? I want to know what is
best for next time."
"Next time," cried my husband. "Next time! Do you think there will be a
next time?"
"_Bien sûr_, Monsieur," the woman answered without hesitation. "The
Germans will come again. They will always come. We are not as big,
_hélas_! They will come--unless your country--?"
Suddenly we realized that not the keeper of the inn, but France, France
through a wife and mother, was speaking. A shadow fell upon us that
Chambertin and the crisp autumn air could not dispel.
1914-1915