CHAPTER XXI
"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 oeuvres 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.