My Year of the War | Page 8

of Paris as a dead city--a Paris
without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the
shutters of its shops down and its cafés and restaurants in gloomy
emptiness.
The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller; the Paris of the
boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist; the Paris that
sparkled and smiled in entertainment; the Paris exploited to the average
American through Sunday supplements and the reminiscences of
smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead. Those who knew no
other Paris and conjectured no other Paris departed as from the tomb of
the pleasures which had been the passing extravaganza of relief, from
dull lives elsewhere. The Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand
francs to get her pet dog safely away to Marseilles. Politicians of a
craven type, who are the curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her
company, leaving Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had
had their morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were
in bloom and madame was arranging her early editions on the table of
her kiosk--a spiritually clean Paris.
Monsieur, would you have America judged by the White Way? What
has the White Way to do with the New York of Seventy-Second Street
or Harlem? It serves the same purpose as the boulevards of furnishing
scandalous little paragraphs for foreign newspapers. Foreigners visit it
and think that they understand how Americans live in Stockbridge,
Mass., or Springfield Illinois, Empty its hotels and nobody but
sightseers and people interested in the White Way would know the
difference.
The other Paris, making ready to stand siege, with the Government
gone to Bordeaux with all the gold of the Bank of France, with the
enemy's guns audible in the suburbs and old men cutting down trees
and tearing up paving-stones to barricade the streets--never had that
Paris been more alive. It was after the death of the old and the birth of

the new Paris that an elderly man, seeing a group of women at tea in
one of the few fashionable refreshment places which were open,
stopped and said:
"Can you find nothing better than that to do, ladies, in a time like this?"
And the Latin temperament gave the world a surprise. Those who
judged France by her playful Paris thought that if a Frenchman
gesticulated so emotionally in the course of everyday existence, he
would get overwhelmingly excited in a great emergency. One evening,
after the repulse of the Germans on the Marne, I saw two French
reserves dining in a famous restaurant where, at this time of the year,
four out of five diners ordinarily would be foreigners surveying one
another in a study of Parisian life. They were big, rosy- cheeked men,
country born and bred, belonging to the new France of sports, of action,
of temperate habits, and they were joking about dining there just as two
sturdy Westerners might about dining in a deserted Broadway. The
foreigners and demimondaines were noticeably absent; a pair of
Frenchmen were in the place of the absentees; and after their dinner
they smoked their black brier-root pipes in that fashionable restaurant.
Among the picture post-cards then on sale was one of Marianne, who is
France, bound for the front in an aeroplane with a crowing French cock
sitting on the brace above her. Marianne looked as happy as if she were
going to the races; the cock as triumphant as if he had a spur through
the German eagle's throat. However, there was little sale for picture
post-cards or other trifles, while Paris waited for the siege. They did not
help to win victories. News and not jeux d'esprit, victory and not wit,
was wanted.
For Marianne went to war with her liberty cap drawn tight over her
brow, a beat in her temples, and her heart in her throat; and the cock
had his head down and pointed at the enemy. She was relieved in a way,
as all Europe was, that the thing had come; at last an end of the
straining of competitive taxation and preparation; at last the test. She
had no Channel, as England had, between her and the foe. Defeat meant
the heel of the enemy on her soil, German sentries in her streets,
submission. Long and hard she had trained; while the outside world,

thinking of the Paris of the boulevards, thought that she could not resist
the Kaiser's legions. She was effeminate, effete. She was all right to run
cafés and make artificial flowers, but she lacked beef. All the prestige
was with her enemy. In '70 all the prestige had been with her. For there
is no prestige like military prestige. It is all with those who won the last
war.
"But if