IX

August 17, 1914.

I have Belgium on my soul. Brave little country that has given new

proof of its courage and nobility, and surprised the world with a ruler

who is a man, as well as king. It occurs to me more than ever to-day

in what a wonderful epoch we have lived. I simply can't talk about it.

The suspense is so great. I heard this morning from an officer that the

English troops are landing, though he tells me that in London they don't

yet know that the Expedition has started. If that is true, it is

wonderful. Not a word in the papers yet, but your press is not censored

as ours is. I fancy you know these things in New York before we do,

although we are now getting a newspaper from Meaux regularly. But there

is never anything illuminating in it. The attitude of the world to the

Belgian question is a shock to me. I confess to have expected more

active indignation at such an outrage.

Everything is very quiet here. Our little commune sent two hundred men

only, but to take two hundred able-bodied men away makes a big hole, and

upsets life in many ways. For some days we were without bread: bakers

gone. But the women took hold and, though the bread is not yet very

good, it serves and will as long as flour holds out. No one complains,

though we already lack many things. No merchandise can come out yet on

the railroads, all the automobiles and most of the horses are gone, and

shops are shy of staple things.

Really I don't know which are the more remarkable, the men or the women.

You may have read the proclamation of the Minister of Agriculture to the

women of France, calling on them to go into the fields and get in the

crops and prepare the ground for the sowing of the winter wheat that the

men on returning might not find their fields neglected nor their crops

lost. You should have seen the old men and the women and the youngsters

respond. It is harvest-time, you know, just as it was in the invasion

of 1870.

In a few weeks it will be time to gather the fruit. Even now it is time

to pick the black currants, all of which go to England to make the jams

and jellies without which no English breakfast table is complete.

For days now the women and children have been climbing the hill at six

in the morning, with big hats on their heads, deep baskets on their

backs, low stools in their hands. There is a big field of black-currant

bushes beside my garden to the south. All day, in the heat, they sit

under the bushes picking away. At sundown they carry their heavy

baskets to the weighing-machine on the roadside at the foot of the

hill, and stand in line to be weighed in and paid by the English buyers

for Crosse and Blackwell, Beach, and such houses, who have, I suppose,

some special means of transportation.

That work is, however, the regular work for the women and children.

Getting in the grain is not. Yet if you could see them take hold of it

you would love them. The old men do double work. Amelie's husband is

over seventy. His own work in his fields and orchard would seem too

much for him. Yet he and Amelie and the donkey are in the field by

three o'clock every morning, and by nine o'clock he is marching down the

hill, with his rake and hoe on his shoulder, to help his neighbors.

There is many a woman working in the fields to-day who was not trained

to it. I have a neighbor, a rich peasant, whose two sons are at the

front. Her only daughter married an officer in the Engineer Corps.

When her husband joined his regiment she came home to her mother with

her little boy. I see her every day, in a short skirt and a big hat,

leading her boy by the hand, going to the fields to help her mother. If

you don't think that is fine, I do. It is only one of many cases right

under my eyes.

There are old men here who thought that their days of hard work were

over, who are in the fields working like boys. There is our

blacksmith--old Pere Marie--lame with rheumatism, with his

white-haired wife working in the fields from sunrise to sunset. He

cheerfully limps up the hill in his big felt slippers, his wife

carrying the lunch basket, and a tiny black-and-tan English dog called

"Missy," who is the family baby, and knows lots of tricks, trotting

behind, "because," as he says, "she is so much company." The old

blacksmith is a veteran of 1870, and was for a long time a prisoner at

Konigsburg. He likes nothing better than to rest a bit on a big stone

at my gate and talk of 1870. Like all Frenchmen of his type he is

wonderfully intelligent, full of humor, and an omnivorous reader.

Almost every day he has a bit of old newspaper in his pocket out of

which he reads to la dame Americaine as he calls me, not being able to

pronounce my name. It is usually something illuminating about the

Germans, when it is not something prophetic. It is wonderful how these

old chaps take it all to heart.

All the time my heart is out there in the northeast. It is not my

country nor my war--yet I feel as if it were both. All my French

friends are there, all my neighbors, and any number of English friends

will soon be, among them the brother of the sculptor you met at my house

last winter and liked so much. He is with the Royal Field Artillery.

His case is rather odd. He came back to England in the spring, after

six years in the civil service, to join the army. His leave expired

just in time for him to reenter the army and see his first active

service in this war. Fortunately men seem to take it all as a matter of

course. That consoles some, I find.

I have just heard that there are two trains a day on which civilians can

go up to Paris IF THERE ARE PLACES LEFT after the army is accommodated.

There is no guaranty that I can get back the same day. Still, I am

going to risk it. I am afraid to be any longer without money, though

goodness knows what I can do with it. Besides, I find that all my

friends are flying, and I feel as if I should like to say "good-bye"--I

don't know why, but I feel like indulging the impulse. Anyway, I am

going to try it. I am going armed with every sort of paper--provisional

passport from our consul, permis de sejour from my mayor here, and a

local permit to enter and leave Paris, which does not allow me to stay

inside the fortifications after six o'clock at night, unless I get

myself identified at the prefecture of the arrondissement in which I

propose to stay and have my passport vised.

X

August 24, 1914.

I seem to be able to get my letters off to you much more regularly than

I dared to hope.

I went up to Paris on the 19th, and had to stay over one night. The

trip up was long and tedious, but interesting. There were soldiers

everywhere. It amused me almost to tears to see the guards all along

the line. We hear so much of the wonderful equipment of the German

army. Germany has been spending fortunes for years on its equipment.

French taxpayers have kicked for years against spending public moneys on

war preparations. The guards all along the railroad were not a jot

better got up than those in our little commune. There they stand all

along the track in their patched trousers and blouses and sabots, with a

band round the left arm, a broken soldier cap, and a gun on the

shoulder. Luckily the uniform and shaved head do not make the soldier.

Just before we reached Chelles we saw the first signs of actual war

preparations, as there we ran inside the wire entanglements that protect

the approach to the outer fortifications at Paris, and at Pantin we saw

the first concentration of trains--miles and miles of made-up trains all

carrying the Red Cross on their doors, and line after line of trucks

with gray ammunition wagons, and cannons. We were being constantly held

up to let trainloads of soldiers and horses pass. In the station we saw

a long train being made up of men going to some point on the line to

join their regiments. It was a crowd of men who looked the lower

laboring class. They were in their working clothes, many of them almost

in rags, each carrying in a bundle, or a twine bag, his few belongings,

and some of them with a loaf of bread under the arm. It looked as

little martial as possible but for the stern look in the eyes of even

the commonest of them. I waited on the platform to see the train pull

out. There was no one to see these men off. They all seemed to

realize. I hope they did. I remembered the remark of the woman

regarding her husband when she saw him go: "After all, I am only his

wife. France is his mother"; and I hoped these poor men, to whom Fate

seemed not to have been very kind, had at least that thought in the back

of their minds.

I found Paris quiet, and every one calm--that is to say, every one but

the foreigners, struggling like people in a panic to escape. In spite

of the sad news--Brussels occupied Thursday, Namur fallen Monday--there

is no sign of discouragement, and no sign of defeat. If it were not for

the excitement around the steamship offices the city would be almost as

still as death. But all the foreigners, caught here by the

unexpectedness of the war, seemed to be fighting to get off by the same

train and the same day to catch the first ship, and they seemed to have

little realization that, first of all, France must move her troops and

war material. I heard it said--it may not be true--that some of the

consular officers were to blame for this, and that there was a rumor

abroad among foreigners that Paris was sure to be invested, and that

foreigners had been advised to get out, so that there should be as few

people inside the fortifications as possible. This rumor, however, was

prevalent only among foreigners. No French people that I saw seemed to

have any such feeling. Apart from the excitement which prevailed in the

vicinity of the steamship offices and banks the city had a deserted

look. The Paris that you knew exists no longer. Compared with it this

Paris is a dead city. Almost every shop is closed, and must be until the

great number of men gone to the front can be replaced in some way.

There are streets in which every closed front bears, under a paper flag

pasted on shutter or door, a sign saying, "Closed on account of the

mobilization"; or, "All the men with the colors."

There are almost no men in the streets. There are no busses or

tramways, and cabs and automobiles are rare. Some branches of the

underground are running at certain hours, and the irregular service must

continue until women, and men unfit for military service, replace the

men so suddenly called to the flag, and that will take time, especially

as so many of the organizers as well as conductors and engineers have

gone. It is the same with the big shops. However, that is not

important. No one is in the humor to buy anything except food.

It took me a long time to get about. I had to walk everywhere and my

friends live a long way apart, and I am a miserable walker. I found it

impossible to get back that night, so I took refuge with one of my

friends who is sailing on Saturday. Every one seems to be sailing on

that day, and most of them don't seem to care much how they get

away--"ameliorated steerage," as they call it, seems to be the fate of

many of them. I can assure you that I was glad enough to get back the

next day. Silent as it is here, it is no more so than Paris, and not

nearly so sad, for the change is not so great. Paris is no longer our

Paris, lovely as it still is.

I do not feel in the mood to do much. I work in my garden

intermittently, and the harvest bug (bete rouge we call him here) gets

in his work unintermittently on me. If things were normal this

introduction to the bete rouge would have seemed to me a tragedy. As it

is, it is unpleasantly unimportant. I clean house intermittently; read

intermittently; write letters intermittently. That reminds me, do read

Leon Daudet's "Fantomes et Vivantes"--the first volumes of his memoirs.

He is a terrible example of "Le fils a papa." I don't know why it is

that a vicious writer, absolutely lacking in reverence, can hold one's

attention so much better than a kindly one can. In this book Daudet

simply smashes idols, tears down illusions, dances gleefully on sacred

traditions, and I lay awake half the night reading him,--and forgot the

advancing Germans. The book comes down only to 1880, so most of the men

he writes about are dead, and most of them, like Victor Hugo, for

example, come off very sadly.

Well, I am reconciled to living a long time now,--much longer than I

wanted to before this awful thing came to pass,--just to see all the

mighty good that will result from the struggle. I am convinced, no

matter what happens, of the final result. I am sure even now, when the

Germans have actually crossed the frontier, that France will not be

crushed this time, even if she be beaten down to Bordeaux, with her back

against the Bay of Biscay. Besides, did you ever know the English

bulldog to let go? But it is the horror of such a war in our times that

bears so heavily on my soul. After all, "civilization" is a word we

have invented, and its meaning is hardly more than relative, just as is

the word "religion."

There are problems in the events that the logical spirit finds it hard

to face. In every Protestant church the laws of Moses are printed on

tablets on either side of the pulpit. On those laws our civil code is

founded. "Thou shalt not kill," says the law. For thousands of years

the law has punished the individual who settled his private quarrels

with his fists or any more effective weapon, and reserved to itself the

right to exact "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." And here we

are today, in the twentieth century, when intelligent people have long

been striving after a spiritual explanation of the meaning of life,

trying to prove its upward trend, trying to beat out of it materialism,

endeavoring to find in altruism a road to happiness, and governments can

still find no better way to settle their disputes than wholesale

slaughter, and that with weapons no so-called civilized man should ever

have invented nor any so-called civilized government ever permitted to

be made. The theory that the death penalty was a preventive of murder

has long ago been exploded. The theory that by making war horrible, war

could be prevented, is being exploded to-day.

And yet--I KNOW that if the thought be taken out of life that it is

worth while to die for an idea a great factor in the making of national

spirit will be gone. I KNOW that a long peace makes for weakness in a

race. I KNOW that without war there is still death. To me this last

fact is the consolation. It is finer to die voluntarily for an idea

deliberately faced, than to die of old age in one's bed; and the grief

of parting no one ever born can escape. Still it is puzzling to us

simple folk--the feeling that fundamental things do not change: that the

balance of good and evil has not changed. We change our fashions, we

change our habits, we discover now and then another of the secrets

Nature has hidden, that delving man may be kept busy and

interested. We pride ourselves that science at least has

progressed, that we are cleaner than our progenitors. Yet we are no

cleaner than the Greeks and Romans in the days when Athens and Rome

ruled the world, nor do we know in what cycle all we know to-day was

known and lost. Oh, I can hear you claiming more happiness for the

masses! I wonder. There is no actual buying and selling in open slave

markets, it is true, but the men who built the Pyramids and dragged the

stone for Hadrian's Villa, were they any worse off really than the

workers in the mines today? Upon my soul, I don't know. Life is only a

span between the Unknown and the Unknowable. Living is made up in all

centuries of just so many emotions. We have never, so far as I know,

invented any new one. It is too bad to throw these things at you on

paper which can't answer back as you would, and right sharply I know.

Nothing going on here except the passing now and then of a long line of

Paris street busses on the way to the front. They are all mobilized and

going as heroically to the front as if they were human, and going to get

smashed up just the same. It does give me a queer sensation to see them

climbing this hill. The little Montmartre-Saint-Pierre bus, that

climbs up the hill to the funicular in front of Sacre-Coeur, came up the

hill bravely. It was built to climb a hill. But the Bastille-Madeleine

and the Ternes-Fille de Calvaine, and Saint-Sulpice-Villette just

groaned and panted and had to have their traction changed every few

steps. I thought they would never get up, but they did.

Another day it was the automobile delivery wagons of the Louvre, the

Bon Marche, the Printemps, Petit-Saint-Thomas, La Belle Jardiniere,

Potin--all the automobiles with which you are so familiar in the

streets of Paris. Of course those are much lighter, and came up

bravely. As a rule they are all loaded. It is as easy to take men to

the front, and material, that way as by railroad, since the cars go.

Only once have I seen any attempt at pleasantry on these occasions.

One procession went out the other day with all sorts of funny

inscriptions, some not at all pretty, many blackguarding the Kaiser,

and of course one with the inevitable "A Berlin" the first battle-cry

of 1870. This time there has been very little of that. I confess it

gave me a kind of shiver to see "A Berlin--pour notre plaisir" all

over the bus. "On to Berlin!" I don't see that that can be hoped for

unless the Germans are beaten to a finish on the Rhine and the allied

armies cross Germany as conquerors, unopposed. If they only could! It

would only be what is due to Belgium that King Albert should lead the

procession "Under the Lindens." But I doubt if the maddest war

optimist hopes for anything so well deserved as that. I don't dare

to, sure as I am of seeing Germany beaten to her knees before the war

is closed.