CHAPTER XXVIII
THE DARKEST DAYS

PROBLEMS of war time housekeeping in France did not go back to 1914. The learned political economists who demonstrated to their own satisfaction that a general European war would not last a year were dead wrong. Millions were mobilized. Nations were at each other's throats. The Germans were able to retaliate against the naval blockade by submarine warfare that threatened to decrease seriously our own communications with the outside world. But somehow we managed to go through year after year without feeling the pinch of decreased productivity. And somehow we accepted the inflation of currency and continued to subscribe cheerfully to successive war loans with money that came from God knows where. One hears now much about how we suffered in 1915 and 1916. Morally speaking, I suppose we did suffer and that we were aware of the strain as time went on. But from a material point of view the war did not make itself felt much until 1917. It was only in the spring of that year that a cartoonist was inspired to draw a necklace of anthracite, tipped off with an egg for a pendant, over the caption, "Her Jewels." Coal cards, sugar cards, and bread cards were to us the signs of Germany's weakness.

Successive Cabinets realized well enough the prudence of anticipatory restrictions. In the autumn of 1916 the newspapers put forth a ballon d'essai. Every day they published a homily on the virtue of practicing economy. It had no effect on my servants, this constant warning of a shortage to come. No restaurants obeyed the voluntary rationing measures. The Government did not dare to introduce obligatory rationing. Public opinion rebels against restrictions of individual liberty. We had to feel the pinch before rationing measures were tolerated.

Sugar cards came first. They were "put over" on the public during the rejoicing over the intervention of the United States. Coal cards were instituted only after the bitter lesson of the late winter months of 1917 bid fair to repeat itself. Not until October, 1917, did I have to put my signature as chef de famille (my husband was so often away) on an application for bread cards handed me by the concierge. A fourth New Year of war came and went before we experienced what we had read about in other countries—real lack of necessities. The reserves of everything gave out suddenly. For the first time ability to spend money freely did not solve household problems.

Some difficulties were insoluble. They were the difficulties centering around a shortage of coal supply. I never realized before that in our modern civilization coal is really a dominating factor in making tolerable existence in the city. The winter before the sudden giving out of coal affected only our heating. In the first months of 1918 coal rationing led to cutting down on gas, electricity and water. In modern apartments, just as there is no way to heat them except by radiators, there is no way to light them except by electricity and no way to have hot water except by turning on the spigot. We were in what the French call a cercle vicieux. We had a fox-and-geese-and-corn problem. For instance, when a municipal ordinance forbade giving hot water except on Saturdays and Sundays, your first thought was to heat water on the kitchen gas-stove. But your allowance for gas was insufficient for cooking. Nor could you use gas for lighting to save electricity. Petroleum for lamps or cooking was unobtainable. Everyone made a rush for candles and wood alcohol. They gave out. When you thought of honey and jams to make up to the children what they lacked in sugar, everyone else thought of honey and jams at the same time. We lived on the sixth floor. The electricity rationing made possible running the elevator only at certain hours. And when the elevator broke down, all the steel was going into cannon and all the workers were turning out munitions. You just walked up six flights of stairs all the time.

Aside from cooking and baths and heat and light, the coal shortage affected your laundry. So you couldn't change linen more frequently to compensate for lost baths. In the old days the laundress would cast her eyes around for more stuff to pack into her bundle, and if you gave her a free hand, would gather up things that had never been soiled. Now she picked out of the basket what she saw fit to take. In the same way, I used to struggle to keep my milk supply down. It was a common trick for the dairy people to load you up with milk and butter and eggs and cheese in collusion with your cook. Now you had to beg for enough milk to give the babies a cup apiece a day; butter arrived in exchange for a heavy tip; and eggs appeared not when you ordered them but when the dairy chose to send them—which was rarely.

To have the laundress acting like that, and other people acting like that, was living in Alice's Looking-Glass House. Things were contrariwise. One day the laundress came to tell me that she could take no more work. The wash house where the work used to be done had shut down. My poor woman was dissolved in tears to think that a business that she had spent twenty-three years in building up had to drop its customers. I did the best I could by getting in a scrub woman for the day to wash the most important things in cold water in the bath-room. That was hard enough. But how dry them? Old tricks would not go: there was no heat in the radiators. You see, as I said, all the troubles came at once and were due primarily to coal shortage. There was no remedy. Insufficient food supply because of lack of means of transportation. Insufficient lack of means of transportation because of shortage of coal for freight engines.

I bought dark jersey dresses for the babies, and lived in dark things myself.

I was fortunate in having a good cook and nurse who stayed with me through thick and thin. But when I came to get a femme de mÉnage for chamber work I realized how justified were the complaints of most of my friends. Women could make big money in munition factories. The large country element, scared away in 1914 or called home to take the place of men at the front, did not feed Paris with help as in peace time. I had a succession of giggling sixteen-year-olds, pottering grandmothers, and useless loafers. One femme de mÉnage I called "Toothless." She thought it was an English pet name, and beamed under it. She was a farm hand from the Marne district. The family fled before the Germans. She was left in charge until the soldiers drove her out. "Toothless" put the chickens in a little hay wagon, tied the cows to the back of it, and, with her employer's silver on her lap, drove alone through the night to safety. She was herded with other evacuated peasants on a steamer bound for Bordeaux. The ship was torpedoed and she lost her teeth by the explosion. I felt very sorry, and regarded her somewhat as a heroine until the truth dawned on me that she was speaking of a plate. I didn't think of this myself. She asked me for an advance one day, explaining that she had to pay it down to a dentist when she ordered more teeth. A stranded Russian student followed "Toothless." She held out until her prosperous father sent money from Petrograd through the Russian Embassy. Try as hard as I could and offer more than I wanted to pay, I could not get a regular third servant. I used to be amazed at the letters from American friends, asking me to send them servants. It must have been the popular notion in the United States that France was full of women eager for the chance to work.

In the fourth year of the war, we began to feel the drain on the nation's manhood. The constant killing and crippling and calling to the colors of older men and boys made it almost impossible to get any work done. Bells or lights or plumbing out of order—you waited for months. Where in 1915 I had found half a dozen paper-hangers and painters eager to bid against each other for the job of renovating my studio, I had to beg and bribe men to come in 1918. It took me four months to get what I wanted done. Herbert became expert in carrying trunks and boxes: but that did him no harm. There is a bright side to everything.

Lines began to form at the grocers and the butchers. One waited and waited and waited. My servants spent most of the day in the early months of 1918 in sugar and meat-lines. All over Paris it was faire la queue for everything, even for tobacco and matches.

Although it was an expensive proposition, I found it necessary, with my large family and constant guests, to buy groceries through an agent. A large English firm seemed to be able to furnish everything—if you paid their price. The order-man who came around every week was a rascal named Grimes. He had the genius of a book-agent, and worked you for an order by playing on your fears. Here is a monologue that I wrote out one day just to record how Grimes sold things.

"Rice? First-class American rice?" (Why Grimes called rice "American" was more than I could understand.) "Still got a little of it—please don't ask me the price. Don't think of that now. Better let me put you down for a hundred pounds of it and just shut your eyes to money. Golden syrup? Just brought three cases of it up from Bordeaux myself. No telling when we will see any more. The submarines are worse than ever: awful, isn't it, but it's best that the newspapers don't tell us the truth. I'm going to let you have two dozen tins of syrup if you don't tell anyone. It's on account of your kiddies. I recommend that you don't let older people touch it. Stack it away for the time when your sugar card—I'm not pessimistic, but I believe you can't be too sure about sugar cards. A funny fellow over at our place said a neat thing: 'It's hard to believe in a paper shortage when the Government has voted sugar cards and those new identity cards.' Biscuits, when have you and I seen a biscuit? I got a few cases in from America. I'll let you have some. I'll reserve a couple of hams and some sides of bacon and hang them in our cellar for you. Gad, you're lucky to have those four babies. It's only because they need the bacon this winter that I give it to you. Now, didn't I tell you that you must not think about money? Trust me to give you a square price. It's safe to say that the beans and other dried vegetables I'm letting you have will make you shiver when you get the bill. But if this order figures up to two thousand francs, you can rest assured that three months from now it would cost you three thousand francs. And six months from now, with all the good will in the world, I couldn't get you the stuff.

"No use mentioning flour. Can't give you any. They say that the Government is meeting on the quiet half the price of the flour before the bakers see it. Comes high but it pays 'em to keep the people quiet. Everything else can go up, but not bread. No m'am, I say it positively; got to give 'em bread and the chance to have a little fun." (I'm sure that Grimes never studied Roman history, but he had arrived at the formula of panem et circenses.) "But we shan't starve. Better off in France than they are in England or Germany. Save the bread for lunch and tea: give the children a cereal in the morning. Just by luck, I have a few cases of American oatmeal and hominy grits.

"Of course, the porridge means milk. I know what you're going to say. But I've got hold of powdered milk made in Brittany. They say it's an American invention. Only one big tin to a person, but then you're six and we'll count the babies as grown ups. You can't tell how long they'll be able to keep transporting milk to the city. Order as much canned goods as I can give you. Canneries are running out of tin. Food we put up in paraffined paste-board doesn't keep very well, and there is mighty little paste-board.

"It's a good thing you don't depend upon cocktails to keep you going. I have a big auto-taxi ticking out there. The man who is going to pay for it would be glad to let it tick all night just so he got what is inside. One hundred bottles of gin. You know, the ordinary five-franc gin. I'm going to get thirty francs a bottle at the Hotel Meurice bar. But they'll be two bottles short. There they are—yours—right under my hat on the table.

"Now please let me read over the order. Not a luxury on it. Macaroni, beans, lentils, prunes, dried-apricots, salt, and yes, there must be some soap. Better let me put you down for a good hundred bars. The Marseilles people tell us they have got to stop making it soon."

Then he resumed his reading, and I didn't dare to say a word. On those rare occasions I was pensive. My husband would say: "You don't need to tell me. That scoundrel Grimes has been here. Good Lord, I wish we had an anti-hording law, like England."

"But, oh, Herbert, the children you know."

I tell this story because I believe it illustrates the thought that was uppermost in the minds of Paris women. We had faith in our armies. We stuck to our homes. We were willing to stand anything. But the constant talk of food shortage got on our nerves. We pictured our children without milk and fats and bread. It was not hard for the Grimeses to fill pages in their order-books. And you could not reason with us that laying in supplies was a sin against the community.

In my apartment-house (and it was the same all over Paris because of the new law) the water-heater was having a good rest. I used to have the kids bathed every night in the week except Sunday. Sunday was a real day of rest. My servants liked to go to early mass and Sunday afternoon was "off" for them and for the governess. Circumstances aided in keeping this side of Sunday as my Covenanter grandfather would have had it. But after the restrictions you bathed Sunday morning or never. And you had to wait for your bath. Inferior coal, parsimoniously stoked, took the water-heater a long time to get going. We chose the next best to godliness. Church attendance fell off. The lawmakers who restricted bathing to Sunday were anticlericals as well as traditionalists.

I had been putting off doing over the apartment and our studios each spring and fall since the war began, saying to myself that I would wait until after the war. But in the autumn of 1917 the time had come to do something. The painter was so short of men that I had to wait three weeks before he sent someone simply to see what was to be done and to make an estimate. The men cleaned half the paint in October. They never came back to do the other half. I was tired of the dull grey wood-work in my husband's studio and the painted grey wainscotting effect that ran around the walls shoulder high. The place looked like a battle-ship turned wrong-side out. Standing in the middle of that studio and looking up to the skylight, I felt as if the hair was flying right off the top of my head. The time came when I could stand it no longer. The painter's soldier son, home on permission, agreed with me. But the father shook his head when I asked him to paint the lower part a cheery buff and the upper part cream-color. He had no helpers. I pled with him then to give me the paint properly mixed, lend me brushes and ladders, and I would send for them and do the work myself. It took me a whole morning to remove a part of the imitation wainscotting. Then other things more pressing came up. My husband, who had been oblivious to the old combination, protested. Fortunately, one of my wounded filleuls, who was able to get around without crutches, did the rest. I helped when I could: for I do love to paint.

The rugs in my drawing-room needed cleaning. At the Bon MarchÉ they offered to write my name down in their books. But they warned me that they could not call for the rugs for three weeks, and that I must understand that they could not be delivered before January. In the end I sent the rugs to three different cleaning places and waited from four to six weeks to get them back.

The curtains of my drawing-room windows were dark green velvet, too depressing a color for wartime. I wonder how I lived with them so long. The drawing-room faces north, and I wanted yellow silk curtains to invite the sunshine in. The curtains should be a frame for the best picture in the drawing-room—a view of Paris that is the reverse of the picture described in the first pages of Zola's Paris. The idea ran away with me, and the momentum of it carried me through the difficulties I found when I tried to get an upholsterer to make the curtains. We are all learning new trades. The curtains were made finally by an artist, who, in order to earn her living through the war years, learned to do retouching of photographs. She and I worked together at those curtains, and you would think that an upholsterer made them.

Then the electric-bells—why can't they be fixed so one can wind them up like a clock? They would not work; that was certain. I unscrewed their little tops and punched the things like miniature type-writer-spacers which the buttons ought to have hit: no ring. Herbert said they "needed new juice" in the batteries. He had the concierge send up some stuff that looked like salt. I climbed on the pantry table to reach the suspicious-looking butter crocks hitched to twisted waxy wires, and poured in the stuff with water according to orders. Still no ring. Then I telephoned for the electrician. Perhaps he would consent to send me Jean Claude, the nearsighted, who put in the wires when we first came and had always been able to make them work. Jean Claude, we heard, had come back from the war. But the electrician answered that Jean Claude had been sent to the front again in spite of his eyes. He would let me have apprentices. The boys were so short that the big monkey-wrench in their tool-kit was as long as their forearms. They climbed my step-ladder and tinkered with the bells for most of an afternoon, while I held the ladder through a sense of paternal protection for anything as young as that and was glad I had bandages and ointment in my cupboard. When evening came, they were like the boy in the song, who said:

Quite naturally they explained that they must ask somebody at the shop what to do and promised to come back next day.

But they did not return. Luckily our dentist turned up on a forty-eight hour furlough. He and his wife knocked long and loud at our front-door. When the first surprise and delight of seeing him back, looking so bronzed and fit, had passed, I apologized for the bell, and told my sad story. The problem awakened the dentist's interest. He went walking about tracing the wires. French wires are all just hitched somewhere above the picture moulding line so you can see them.

"Aha!" came from the pantry. It was the dentist's voice. At the same moment there was a prolonged ringing. "That's what comes from earning your living by making your brains speak through your fingers. Quite simple, quite simple," said the dentist. "I only arranged this little affair on the indicator. It was the fourth screw from the back at the upper line of the plate."

"Sakes," I cried, "get down from there before you give me a toothache!"

We all go through the world lighting up its darkness with our own kind of lantern.

Throughout the war we have done with clothes as with our houses—making things do. That went very well at first. But in the fourth winter wear and tear had to be met. We learned a new scale of values for little things. A green glass lampshade cost fifteen francs, and you were lucky to get it. The plug to stick in the hole for an electric light you scoured the town to purchase at seven francs. The steel wire your frotteur uses to polish floors quadrupled in price. My frotteur went to war long ago. His substitute, a chauffeur in the postal service, gave us two afternoons in a month—his only free time. One day he defended his service gallantly while he balanced a wet brown cigarette and cake-walked the steel wire over my salon floor. The long black autos marked postes et dÉpÊches, terror of pedestrians in Paris, do not really go faster than other autos. We think they do because they were the first autos to be used extensively in the city, and the fear of being knocked down by them has stuck in the minds of the public.

I used to have half a dozen "nice little dressmakers" on my list and as many milliners to whom I could send friends confidently. But as the war dragged on, one after the other they disappointed me. If it were not poor cut and shoddy materials, it was inability to make delivery anywhere near the time promised. Everyone must have been in my position, because when I turned to the department stores for ready-made things, I found long lines awaiting for a turn with the sales woman. It is not the fault of dressmakers. One of them opened her heart to me.

"It is very hard. Like everybody else, I keep hoping the war will end suddenly. My reputation was made by my premiÈres ouvriÈres. I still keep on paying them good wages now although I eat into my savings to do it. I cannot risk having my best girls go over to competitors. We had our side in the strike of the midinettes. If it had not hit me hard, I should have been amused to see these pretty young things dressed in clothes cheap in material but chic go marching along the boulevards winning policemen over at every corner. I raised pay beyond my means, and have granted the semaine anglaise. But they would go to-morrow for the least thing.

"For twenty years I have had three classes of customers in Paris: bourgeoises of the solid type, who come to me for the reserved sort of clothes that sell on line, good material and long wear. They paid my rent. American women, who came in the summer, or hurried through Paris in February, headed for the Riviera, wanted an advance idea rapidly executed. That trade paid my running expenses. From actresses and mistresses I got fantastic prices for exclusive models I promised not to repeat. From them I made my profits.

"The first class are deft-fingered like all French women, and do their own dressmaking now. They get their mourning from the houses that make a specialty of that trade. The Americans do not come as they used to. My profitable trade does not have the money for fine clothes or the opportunity to show them off."

Curious it seems to me now, when I sit down to write a chapter about the darkest days of the war, that I find myself penning page after page of the story of petty household difficulties. But I want to be what the French call vÉridique. This is how we felt during the first winter of the American intervention, when the A. E. F. was coming to France with painful slowness and when we were aware that the Germans were preparing a final desperate coup before Pershing could marshal an army, effective in training and equipment and numbers. In January and February, 1918, we were under the reaction of the Russian collapse, of the awakening to the falsehoods concerning German military strength that had been spread consistently for three years, of the nervous dread that the submarines might after all prevent the coming of the Americans. The little things, strikes, petty annoyances of daily house keeping, steady increase in the cost of living made the deep impression.

Then came the new German onslaught, the daily long-distance bombardment and the aeroplane raids every night.

CHAPTER XXIX
THE GOTHAS AND BIG BERTHA

In the early days of the A. E. F., when I was speaking to American soldiers in the camps, I used to leave a little time for questions at the end of my talk. The boys always had something in their heads they wanted to talk about. The scope and variety of their questions were amazing. But some one was sure to ask:

"Have you ever been in an air raid?"

When I answered in the affirmative, he would say,

"How did you feel?"

For a long time I reasoned like the poilu, who said that if his number was on a German shell it would find him. Herbert and I worked it out mathematically that our chances of being hit in the enormous area of Paris were not as great as of being knocked down by one of the crazy Indians we had for chauffeurs. When any left-over of a man could get a license to run a taxi-cab in Paris after a course of two days at fifty francs, why worry about bombs dropped from an occasional Hun plane? If we had to go, we'd rather be in our beds. Better to be warm and cosy and run a slight risk, an infinitesimal risk, than the almost certain alternative of a bad cold by huddling in a drafty cellar. I told the boys that we took the raids as a matter of course—all in the day's happenings. I explained my philosophy, which was this.

I once knew a man so afraid of germs that he made his wife wash new stockings in disinfectant solution. He kept strict surveillance over his children's diet. No peanuts, pink lemonade, little-store-around-the-corner candy for them. They were taught to exercise minute precautions in the every-day round of living. And yet, for all the bother, they had as many ailments as other children. When one is leading a normal life and has only imaginary or petty things to contend with, molehills are magnified. When one is facing a great crisis, one realizes that health is often simply a matter of lack of physical selfconsciousness. Most of the things you think about and guard against do not happen. I remember once seeing a play, in which a Romeo and a Juliet held the center of the stage, oblivious to fighting in the distance. The man said: "That is only a battle; this is love." Some people see the honey in the pot; others cannot take their eyes off the fly.

I still hold to this way of taking things. It saves a lot of trouble and makes for peace of mind. But somehow it did not work out to the end in the air raids. The Germans were finally able to reach Paris when they wanted to and in appreciable number.

From the beginning of the war to the end of 1917, air raids did not mean much to Parisians. We read about the awful nights of terror when the full moon came around in London, and the heavy bombardment of cities just behind the front lines in France. Aeroplanes did come occasionally to Paris. But up to 1918 we experienced curiosity and excitement rather than fear. In 1915 we saw a Zeppelin over the Gare Saint-Lazare. I can recall nothing particularly startling about any of these raids. When aeroplanes came and we did not wake the babies, they scolded us the next day. They wanted to see the fun. Our balconies, looking over the city from the sixiÈme Étage of the Boulevard du Montparnasse, gave us a wonderful vantage point for seeing the raids.

One January night at the beginning of 1918, the fire engines rushed through the streets with their horns screaming the hysterical "pom-pom! pom-pom!" with more vigor than usual. As was our custom, we turned the lights carefully out and went on the balcony to watch the weird scene that never failed to fascinate, rockets and searchlights and the firefly effect of rising French planes. That always comforted us. We had little thought that an escadrille of German planes could reach Paris. They never had before. The raids had been only an occasional plane flying very high and dropping at random a few bombs which burst in different quarters. The next day you had to hunt hard to find the damage they did. Remembering our promise to Christine, we woke her up and took her out.

The sounds of the alarm died away. Often we had waited in vain for the fire from the forts around Paris to warn us that the raiders had actually arrived in the vicinity of Paris. Then there was another wait until the first bomb fell. Christine was a bit disgusted at being waked up for nothing. During the long silence she asked impatiently, "What is this? The entre'acte?"

But Christine was not disappointed. Over our heads we heard distinctly the harsh engine-sound that distinguished the new German Gotha from French planes. We heard it several times. When the bombs began to drop, it was not one or two, but dozens of explosions. We did not think of going inside. The thought of danger to ourselves did not enter our heads.

Although we knew the raid had been something different from any we had experienced up to this time, there was little in the papers about the events of the night. We thought that we must have been mistaken in the number of bombs that had fallen. It is not always easy to distinguish between the explosions of a shell from the tir de barrage and the explosion of a bomb. Before we got through the first month of 1918 we had the opportunity of becoming expert in this.

We happened to be lunching with Robert and EdmÉe Chauvelot. Robert said, "Did you go down to the cellar last night?"

"No, we never do."

"Why not?" cried Robert.

I explained our air raid philosophy.

"Nonsense!" exclaimed Madame Alphonse Daudet, EdmÉe's mother, "you must go down next time. It isn't fair to your children. Your idea sounds spunky and American—childish you understand. When we have epidemics, the authorities study remedies. The Huns have decided to concentrate their energies on Paris now. You must have read the warnings in the newspapers. The police have collected statistics. We know now that most of the people killed by German planes were standing at windows or front doors, or were on the streets, or remained in their top-floor apartments. What you have been telling your soldier boys in the camps is all wrong. No precaution ought to be neglected. It is a question of commonsense, not fear."

"I know how to convince you," said Robert. After lunch he took us to the Avenue de la Grande ArmÉe not far from the Arc de Triomphe.

"There!" He pointed to a house whose top floors had been blown away. "That might just as well have been you."

The house was a new one like ours and as solidly built of stone. The apartment on the sixiÈme Étage was pulverized, the one below it was smashed, and the fourth floor damaged some. But the third floor was intact. This convinced us. If air raids were now to be frequent, had we the right to risk the kiddies? We could take the chance for ourselves. But for them?

All Paris reasoned in the same way. The Gothas began to come every night during the full moon periods and other times when it was clear. In the late afternoon we grew accustomed to watch the sky and calculate the chances of cloudy weather. If the stars came out we were sure that there would be no undisturbed night's rest. The Government intensified the batteries of A.D.C. cannon around the city. Patrols of aeroplanes were multiplied. The tir de barrage became formidable. None could boast any longer of being able to sleep through air raids. Sirens were put on all the public buildings to replace the alerte of the fire-trucks. When the sirens began to wail, not a soul in Paris could complain of not being warned. Frequently nothing happened after the sirens, because the alerte was given each time German planes were signalled crossing our lines in the direction of Paris. Then we would simply wait for the berloque, the bugle signal "all's over," which was sounded by the firemen riding through the streets on their hook and ladder trucks.

When the Gothas demonstrated their ability to come in numbers, as the Zeppelins had been doing in London, the municipality, upon orders from the MinistÈre de la Guerre, ordered every light out and the instant stopping of tramway and underground services the moment the alerte was sounded. Engineers went around the city examining cellars and MÉtro stations. Houses with solid cellars were compelled to keep their front doors open until the number of persons they could hold had taken refuge inside. In front of the house placards were posted with ABRI in large letters and the number of persons allotted for shelter underneath. The underground railways had to shut all stations except those deemed safe. If you were on the street or in an underground train or tramway when the alerte sounded, you had the choice of walking home or of taking refuge in the nearest abri. At first the theatres and moving-picture houses protested against being closed down. But one January night a bomb destroyed completely a house a hundred yards from the crowded Folies-BergÈre. This was enough. After that, if the alerte sounded before opening time, there was no show. If it sounded during a performance, theatres and cinÉmas were evacuated immediately by the police.

One can readily see the inconvenience of all this. If you planned to go out for dinner or to a show, you risked a long walk home or being caught for hours—and then the walk! For it was practically impossible to get into the underground after the berloque sounded.

On account of the children, from January to April, we went far from home only on a cloudy or rainy night. If there were engagements we had to keep on a clear night, there was only one thing to do—bribe a chauffeur to stand by you with his taxi-cab all evening.

As the alertes were often false alarms, we waited until the tir de barrage began. Then with servants carrying children wrapped in blankets, we had to stumble down dark stairs. My husband was often away. Sometimes I had to go on lecture trips. But we never left Paris at the same time. Whenever I was out of town, I looked on clear weather as a calamity and dreaded the full moon. The next morning I would eagerly scan the paper for news of what happened in Paris. It was no fun.

Cellars of modern apartment houses may be solid, but they are not spacious. Each locataire has two caves, one for storage and coal and one for wine. The only refuge space is around the furnace and in the long corridors that lead to the caves. We were allotted space for three hundred. Such a crowd would gather from the streets! I could not take my children there. At first we went to the concierge's loge. As explosion succeeded explosion, I telephoned the Herald office and learned the location of the bomb a few minutes after it fell. This was a way of knowing whether they were in our quarter or across the river. But this soon ended. For telephone service during the raid was interrupted, and the concierge's loge was deemed by the police unsafe. Bombs falling in the street or court were wrecking ground floors. A solidarity manifested itself among the locataires. Those on the first two or three floors took in the tenants from the upper floors. I was lucky in having the use of a first-floor apartment alone for my family. The locataires of this apartment would leave the door open for me. They went to the cellar! Everything is relative in this life.

At first, the children objected to going down stairs. The younger ones did not like to be wakened from their sleep. The older ones wanted to see the raid from the balcony. We sympathized with them. We were missing so much! After a while, as nothing ever happened to our house, I began to regret having started to follow the advice of my friends. After all, was the cellar safe? It was fifty-fifty. I wonder how my children will feel about Germany as they grow up. They were old enough to have impressed indelibly upon their minds the memory of these months. They will never forget the sirens, the sudden waking from sleep, the tir de barrage, and the explosions that sometimes shook our house. Mimi asked once, "Do the Gothas make that siren noise with their heads or with their tails?" Fancy the image in the child's mind: the German birds swooping over Paris shrieking a song of hate and dropping bombs that meant destruction and death. And when the berloque sounded and we went up stairs, we could see from our balcony fires here and there over the city. For the Germans used incendiary bombs.

But we were to have worse than air raids.

The other day I put on the victrola a selection from "Die Walkyrie." Wotan was singing. The orchestra thundered three motifs. The spring of the instrument ran down before I could get to wind it up, there was a rasping shriek. Mimi started.

"That's like an air raid!" cried Lloyd.

But they say the most potent way "to summon up remembrance of things past" is the sense of smell. Burned toast means to me Big Bertha.

One Saturday morning I was reading the depressing news of the rout of the Fifth British army. After nearly four years of immobility in the trenches, the Germans had once more started the march on Paris. The two older children were out walking with Alice, their gouvernante. I was at home with the babies. It was a jewel of a day, picked from an October setting and smiling upon Paris in March. The feel of spring was in the air. For months we had welcomed bad weather as an antidote for Gothas. But I was glad the morning was so fine. At least there was nothing to fear until evening. At the end of winter it is a blessing to have the windows open once more. Suddenly the sirens started. We went out on the balcony. The streets were filling with people, crowding into the Vavin MÉtro station opposite and looking for the houses that were abris. Still the crowds in the Boulevard du Montparnasse got larger. I was sorry that Easter vacation was starting so early. Were the children in school, they would be in the cellar. At the Ecole Alsacienne the children were drilled for air raids as American school children are for fire. Would Alice take the children to her own home or come back here? If she went to her house, could she get there in time to telephone me before the communications were cut off? It was impossible to go out and look for Christine and Lloyd: for I must stay with the others. Often the best thing is to sit tight. The children came in.

"It isn't the Gothas—it's balloons. The Germans have sent a lot of them over us. Everybody says so."

In the unclouded sky there was no sign of aeroplanes. Could they be so high as to be out of sight? And yet there were explosions near us every few minutes. They lasted until late in the afternoon. The rumor of a big gun spread. The noon newspapers and the earlier afternoon ones spoke of a long distance bombardment to explain the explosions. Shells were certainly falling. Bits of them, different from bombs, had been picked up. But the opinion of interviewed experts scouted the theory of a gun that would carry over a hundred kilometers. Was a new German advance being hidden from us? Had they reached the gates of the city?

Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois
Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois

That night we had our air raid as usual. The next morning the newspapers told us that we could now expect to be shelled by day as well as bombed by night. It was established that the Germans had discovered a means of sending shells from their old lines all the way to Paris.

We were in the axis of Big Bertha, as the cannon was immediately dubbed. This was a new and more severe test for nerves. We got accustomed to it. For the trial, the strength. The kiddies had to have exercise and you yourself could not be home every minute of the time. But my feeling each time a shell exploded is the most horrible memory of the war. You never knew where it fell. On the third day when the children came home from the Luxembourg, they told me that a shell from Big Bertha had torn away a corner of the Grand Bassin. I tried to steel myself. One can become a fatalist for oneself. But it is not easy to be a fatalist for your children.

Then we had a lull. We were assured that there was only one Big Bertha or at the most two. The life of the cannon was a hundred shots. Counting those that fell in the suburbs, the attempt to intimidate Paris was over.

We were thankful now that we had only the air raids.

I woke up on Thursday morning, thinking to give the children a treat. I built a wood fire, and started to make some toast. As I sat on the floor, cutting pieces of bread, I told myself that it would not help to worry. Perhaps it was true that the Germans had sprung a trick they could not repeat. At any rate, the news from the front was good. The British had made a magnificent recovery. The French were helping them stop the hole. General Pershing was throwing all the Americans in France into the breach north of Paris. There was something to be thankful for. Even if Big Bertha started up again, we were as safe from shells in our own home as anywhere else. I said to myself, "I am going to forget Big Bertha and put my mind on the children's treat—hot buttered toast for breakfast." There were enough embers now to make the toast. I speared a piece of bread with the kitchen fork and held it over the fire.

"Bing!"

The toast dropped from my fork and was burned before I could pick it out.

Mimi, who was sleeping in the bed close by, woke up.

"Hello, Mama," she said cheerfully. "Dat's Big Bertha again. I did hear her."

CHAPTER XXX
THE BIRD CHARMER OF THE TUILERIES

The Paris subway system is the best in the world. We make this boast without fear of contradiction. In London the various lines do not connect, and require a life study to arrive at the quickest combination. Even then, old Londoners are in doubt. They say to you, "Piccadilly Circus? Ah let me see—" Then your guide contradicts himself two or three times before giving you directions of which he is reasonably sure. In New York, you have to be certain you are on the uptown or downtown side, and that you have not mistaken the Broadway line, where you drop the money in the box, for the Seventh Avenue line, where you buy tickets. Experience with the Forty-second Street shuttle teaches you that it is quicker to walk than to ride: you have to walk most of the way anyhow. New York subways are filthy and stuffy. In Boston you have a bewildering variety of trolley-cars, stopping at different parts of the platform and going every which way.

But Paris underground is clean, well-ventilated, orderly. You can go from any part of the city to any other part quickly and without confusion. The resident knows his way instinctively. The stranger has only to follow the abundant and clearly-marked signs. In every station the signs bear the name of every other station, and if you are in doubt, there is a map before you. On the doors of cars the stations are marked, with junction-stops in red, and all the stations of the line you are taking are indicated on a map which you cannot fail to see.

The subway system of Paris is superb because it has to compete with excellent surface transportation. It has also to compete with the beauty of Paris. Unless you are in a hurry or it is a very rainy day, riding underground is folly. One never tires of going through the streets of Paris. The joy is constant. I am proud of the "MÉtro" and "Nord-Sud," as the two subway systems are called. But I use them as little as possible. An open fiacre is a temptation never to be resisted. And, until the last year of the war, it was a temptation thrust under your nose. Best of all, I love to walk. Our way to the Rive Droite is down the Boulevard Raspail. At the foot of the boulevard, you have three choices. You can go straight ahead through the Rue du Bac and over the Pont Royal, by the Boulevard Saint-Germain and across the Pont de SolfÉrino, or to the end of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and across the Pont de la Concorde. Each route is equally inspiring. By the Pont SolfÉrino you have before you a perfect vista of the VendÔme Column and SacrÉ-Coeur in the background. By the Pont de la Concorde you have the ObÉlisque and the Madeleine in the background. But I used to prefer the Rue du Bac and the Pont Royal because of Monsieur Pol. Alas that I have to say "used to"!

After crossing the Seine by the Pont Royal, you enter the Tuileries Garden at the end of the Louvre. On the left-hand side, before you reached the Rue de Rivoli, ever since I can remember a little group was gathered around a man feeding birds. I had to be in a great hurry on the day I did not join that group.

There is an old saying that every man drifts into his means of livelihood. That is the reason so few people are doing what they planned to do, and why there are so many queer ways of earning one's living. Certainly the first time Monsieur Pol threw bread crumbs to the sparrows in Tuileries he did not think of doing it for a living. Nor did he dream that he would become as familiar a Paris landmark as Paul DeroulÈde in marble and Jeanne d'Arc in gilt near by. A generation of Parisians may have forgotten the features of former presidents of the Republic. But who would not recognize Monsieur Pol? In fact, I have seen Emile Loubet standing unrecognized in the crowd around the bird charmer.

One day a one-legged soldier limped his way through the crowd to a good place. In the lines of his face you could read suffering, but the expression was of a happy child absorbed in the wonder of the moment. On the sand around the old man's chair a hundred sparrows faced his way, heads uplifted.

"Get out of this, you rascals! I have had enough of you," cried Monsieur Pol, stamping his foot and shaking a fist at his battalion. Do you think they budged? The bird charmer shook his head, and remarked with a gentle sigh, turning to the crowd, "You see, they have known me a good while. Mind how you behave," he shouted, addressing the birds again, "here is a soldier looking at you. Think how he will laugh if you do not stand up straight. Look how well he's standing himself—with one leg gone."

The birds heard a speech praising their defender, which turned into a glorification of our poilus in general. How those birds had to listen to lessons in politics, shrewd comments on the news of the day, the latest Cabinet crisis, talked-about play, scandal in high life! Since the war it has been the Germans in Belgium, the Turks in Armenia, Kerensky and the Bolshevists, and the last three o'clock communiquÉ. The birds gave their attention to the end. They seemed to know when the speech was done, when the lesson of faith in France and optimism had been driven home. They began to fly about the charmer, billing around his neck and perching on his wide-brimmed hat in search of bread-crumbs.

Feeding the sparrows was "un mÉtier comme un autre." He had names for all his pets. With "the Englishman" he talked about Edward the Seventh, Sir Thomas Barclay and the Entente Cordiale, and pressed him on the subject of the tunnel under the Channel. He complimented "the Englishman" on the bravery of the Tommies and told him what the French thought of Sir Douglas Haig. "The Deputy" received frank comments on the doings at the Palais Bourbon. "The Drunk" was twitted for having to go without absinthe, scolded for his excesses, and at the end of the afternoon invited to accompany Monsieur Pol for a drink, the price of which invariably came from someone in the crowd. Monsieur Pol and his sparrows would have earned a fortune at any vaudeville house. He was as witty as a cowboy rope-juggler I saw once in New York, and his lectures to the birds, if taken down in shorthand, would have made a valuable contemporary commentary on Paris during the Third Republic. Monsieur Pol depended upon occasional gifts and the sale of postcards.

During the war he grew gradually more feeble, but could not be persuaded to accept the care of loving hands stretched out to him on all sides in spite of the preoccupation of the struggle. When the bread restrictions came in, he never lacked a sufficient supply for his little friends. I have seen people give him strips of their own bread tickets. Monsieur Pol kept coming to the Tuileries until he died in action as truly as any soldier at the front. His best epitaph is a little verse on the postcards he sold:

CHAPTER XXXI
THE QUATORZE OF TESTING

BIG BERTHA, or rather her successors, kept up a sporadic bombardment of Paris in April and May. A few shells fell again in June. But the effect of the bombardment, materially and morally, was nothing like that of the original Big Bertha. The culmination of horror and indignation was reached on Good Friday afternoon, when a hundred people were killed in the church of Saint-Gervais. After that the Germans made no other big killing. They came to realize that Big Bertha could not intimidate or demoralize Paris. Where the shells fell, however, we shall never forget.

I used to listen with awe (and a bit of envy) to the stories of people who passed through the siege of 1870. I remember well when I was a child being told by my father's friends, as we drove in the city, "A shell burst here in 1870 and tore the front out of a shop: I was sitting at a cafÉ near by"; or, "On that spot the Versailles troops stormed a barricade and lined its defenders against a wall—there was no quarter." Now I have my stories to tell! There is hardly a street between the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Seine that is not associated in my mind with an aeroplane bomb or a Big Bertha shell. The compensation for having lived through these days will be the privilege of telling Americans who come to see us "all about it." As the years go by, I have no doubt that legends will form themselves in my mind and that I shall do my full share of innocent and unintentional lying. You want to impress your listener: so you must make things graphic.

But I shall never be eloquent enough to enhance upon or exaggerate the nervous tension through which we passed during the spring and early summer of 1918. From the moment we learned the news of the collapse of the Fifth British Army, which brought the Germans to Montdidier, until the tide of battle was definitely turned, we never had an easy moment. The strain was worse than in 1914. For it lasted months instead of weeks, and reverses after four years of fighting, with all the world against Germany, were more difficult to understand and to stand. The British were just recovering themselves when the Germans fell on the French, captured the entire Craonne plateau for which we had been struggling for three years, reoccupied Soissons, and started to advance once more from the Aisne to the Marne.

It was not easy to be an optimist. We had faith in the holding ability of the French and British armies; we believed that the Germans were shooting their last bolt; and we knew that the Americans were arriving in large numbers. But we had been fooled so often about internal conditions in Germany! And Russia and the submarine warfare were factors concerning which we had no exact data. The people who recreate the past with the advantage of hindsight will tell that they never worried a minute. They knew things were coming out all right! To listen to them one would think that they expected all along to happen just what did happen in the way it did happen. When I hear this kind of talk now I know that it was either a case of

or hopeless bumptiousness. How strange it is that many of those who tell you now that the Germans never had a chance ran away from Paris in 1914 and again in 1918.

Parisians passed no fortnight in which there was more anxiety and uncertainty to their beloved city than the first two weeks of July. The Germans were widening their pocket. They occupied the right bank of the Marne from ChÂteau-Thierry to Dormans. They crossed the Marne. It was too late for Germany to hope to win the war. But would they get to Paris?

On July Fourth I was in reconquered Alsace and my husband was speaking at Tours. He telegraphed me to join him at Boulogne-Sur-Mer on July seventh. It took me three days to go in slow trains, with an occasional lift by motor, the entire length of the front. I saw everywhere reserves of troops and endless lines of motor-trucks and trains with cannon and ammunition. The American uniform was ubiquitous. All this gave me a hope and confidence I had not felt in Paris, where I knew that the Government was making more elaborate preparations than in 1914 to evacuate the city. Herbert and I returned to Paris from Etaples on July ninth. The direct route by AbbÉville and Amiens was under the German cannon, so we had to make a wide detour by TrÉport and Beauvais. We both had a raging fever and it was all we could do to get home from the Gare de Nord.

Doctor Charon came early in the morning and told us that we were down with the grippe espagnole, the plague that was sweeping France and that had much to do with the general depression. Many a soldier who had gone through four years of battle unscathed succumbed to this mysterious disease. It hit one suddenly and the end came quickly. On the other hand, if the first forty-eight hours passed without complications, recovery was as rapid. Despite the protests of Doctor Charon, Herbert got out of bed on the morning of the thirteenth to go to Lyons to the inauguration of the Pont PrÉsident-Wilson. I was up to celebrate the Quatorze. After it was over, I was glad of the illness that came to keep me in Paris for this day when we whistled to keep up our courage. Had the Spanish grip not interfered, I should have returned to my children in the Little Gray Home near Saint-Nazaire.

The military operations in July, 1918, were not critical from the standpoint of the safety of France and the success of the Allied cause. The size of the army America was sending to France put the Germans in such a hopeless inferiority of numbers that as soon as the table of the landing of the first million was published we knew that the Germans were doomed if the fighting continued. But we had a growing number of strikes and a wide-spread defeatist campaign in the rear to contend with. If Paris were taken, what would be the effect on French public opinion? This was the stake the Germans were fighting for, and they knew it was their only hope of salvation.

Never have I loved Paris more than on the Quatorze of testing. Music and dancing were lacking, of course: for since 1914 we had not danced in public out of respect to the dead and music had been barred in cafÉs. Military bands had other places to play than in Paris. But happen what might, Parisians were determined to celebrate the fÊte just as if the Germans had not crossed the Marne. I went out for the day with friends. We smiled and laughed and tried to have a good time. The relaxation helped all to bear the burden. Within limits hedonism has its merits. "Eat, drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die" is the philosophy that wins out when a crisis is being faced.

I went to the review in the morning, and made a round of the streets and the Champs-ElysÉes Quarter that had been rebaptized in honor of our Allies. The Paris Municipal Council cannot be accused of lacking optimism in regard to persons as well as events. Belief in victory and in the permanent esteem for those who were bringing it to pass led to changes of names that may not in retrospect have popular approval. The Avenue du TrocadÉro has become the Avenue du PrÉsident-Wilson; the Avenue d'Antin, the Avenue Victor-Emanuel III; the Avenue de l'Alma, the Avenue Georges V; the Quai DÉbilly, the Quai de Tokio; part of the Rue Pierre-Charron, the Rue Pierre I de Serbie; and the Place de l'Alma, the Place des AlliÉs.

When Herbert returned from the Quatorze at Lyons, we celebrated the Franco-American victory of the Marne with a dinner at Parc Montsouris. Whoever has been to the Pavillon du Lac becomes a regular client. We discovered this unpretentious little restaurant many years ago when we were exploring with Christine and the baby-carriage. Ever since Xavier has been our friend. Xavier does not need to be on the Grands Boulevards. He prepares the choicest dishes with utmost confidence that his friends will bring their friends to Montsouris. The Pavillon du Lac is nearly a mile from the nearest MÉtro station and no taxicabs are to be found out there by the fortifications. But difficulty of transportation is more than compensated for by the restfulness of the Pavillon du Lac, its cuisine—and Xavier, with his good humor and witticisms, waiting on the table. You eat on the terrasse facing the park, with its waterfall and lake, and you feel that it is all yours—park and restaurant. From patron to chef, everybody calls you by name, and most of the people at the tables are your friends. In the salon is a piano. You dance to your heart's content. Xavier dances with you.

When I try to write of the Pavillon du Lac, memories crowd in on me thick and fast. I could have put this restaurant in almost any chapter of my Paris vistas.

But what place could a dinner at Montsouris enter more appropriately than on the night of July 18, 1918? We were celebrating better than we knew. The afternoon communiquÉ brought with it the certainty that the miracle of 1914 had been repeated and that Paris was saved again. Did we realize that the day's fighting was the turning point of the war? I think not. But we acted as if we did.

Around our table were gathered the American General commanding the troops in Paris, my husband's chief on the Committee of Public Information, a French editor, colleagues of the American and British press, and one of our dearest French friends, whose work for his country in the hour of trial was bearing splendid fruit. Xavier was at his best. Had I not recently been in his beloved Alsace from which he had been an exile since childhood? From hors d'oeuvres to liqueurs, there was an uninterrupted flow of good cheer. The strain of years was passing away.

The climax came when Jim Kerney picked up his cordial glass, twirled it with his thumb, looked at it regretfully, and sighed,

"The fellow who blew this glass was certainly short of breath."

Old Paris is disappearing
Old Paris is disappearing

CHAPTER XXXII
THE LIBERATION OF LILLE

FROM the Boulevard des Capucines to the Avenue de l'OpÉra there is a convenient short-cut through the Rue Daunou. Newspaper men and other Americans do not always use the Rue Daunou for the short-cut. It is better known as the way to the Chatham bar. I ought to know nothing about the Chatham bar. My acquaintance with that corner should be limited to the Restaurant Volney and ladies' days at my husband's club opposite. But I do know the Chatham bar and for a perfectly respectable reason. It is where my old uncle used to be found when the clerk at his hotel said that he was not in. The uncle makes me think of a friend of his and a table with a little brass disk in the center of it to commemorate assiduous attendance through a long period of years in the Chatham bar. And the uncle's friend makes me think of the liberation of Lille. Association of ideas is a strange thing.

Herbert and I sat one evening in the autumn of 1915 before a big map with my uncle's friend. His fingers lay upon the Flanders portion of what we had come to call "the front." Bubbling over with excitement, he exclaimed,

"They have broken through here, I tell you, day before yesterday. I always knew that when Kitchener's army was ready the trick would be turned. Of course the censorship is holding up the news, but everybody knows it. A sharp bombardment that overwhelmed the Boches, and then the break through. The Boches were routed. Talk about not being able to storm trenches! The cavalry has passed Lille. At this moment Lille is liberated. The British must be there in force."

"But," objected my husband, "this is too good to be true. They could not hold back news like that, you know. If the British are in Lille, the war is over."

"Of course it is over," insisted my uncle's friend. "We shall have peace by Christmas."

Mr.—well I won't tell you his name—let us say Mr. Smith, was hardly to blame for taking the wish for the fact. The rumor of a big break through the Flanders front was everywhere in Paris. Fourteen months of war had been enough. The French had waited a year for the British to form an army. Why shouldn't it be true that now the end had come?

Alas! we were to wait three years more before the lines in Flanders were crossed; we were to have many costly disappointments like that of Neuve-Chapelle. But when the moment finally did come, the liberation of Lille was to mean the beginning of the end.

In October, 1919, when I came back to Paris from the Little Gray Home, I returned to a city where there was a feeling of victory in the air. The most conservative had lost their habitual pessimism. The most resigned, who had come to accept the war as a fatality that would never end as long as there were men to fight, began to revise their opinions. The most suspicious, who wagged their heads over communiquÉs no matter what the authorities said, felt that after all we were making "some progress." Each day the list of liberated communes grew longer. But until some big city was abandoned, Parisians were afraid of having to pay too big a price to break down the Boche resistance. After all, they had proved themselves stubborn fighters. They might elect to make a long "last ditch" combat on lines of which we did not know the existence. But if they abandoned Lille, that would mean the intention of falling back to the Meuse. Genuine optimism is as hard to instil as it is to dispel. In retrospect, many writers are now asserting that Parisians knew the Boches were beaten after the failure of their last July offensive from the Vesle to the Marne. But this is not true. Relief over the failure to reach Paris did not mean certainty of the imminent collapse of Ludendorf's war machine.When summertime was over, and darkness came suddenly from one day to the next, Herbert and I resumed our walks at nightfall. During the war we had lost our interest in buildings as memorials of the past. Contemporary history had crowded out ante-bellum associations. The Eiffel Tower was not a gigantic monstrosity, a relic of the Exposition. It was a wireless-telegraphy station, the ear, the eye, the voice of Paris. Tramping by the Champs de Mars, we saw the sentinels in their faded blue coats of the fifth year and felt sorry for the men up there always listening in the pitiless cold. Crossing the Pont Alexandre III, we forgot the splendor of the Czars and thought of Nicholas in the hands of the Bolsheviki. The Grand Palais no longer recalled brilliant Salons. We thought of the blind in the hospital there and of the re-education of mutilated poilus. The picture inside was a one-armed soldier learning to run a typewriter, and a man with both legs amputated sitting on a low bench, the light of renewed hope in his eyes: for he had found out that he could still do a man's work in the world by becoming a cobbler. The newspaper building, whose cellar windows used to fascinate us, was the place where we waited for the posting of the communiquÉ. The Invalides was no longer just Napoleon's tomb. It was the place where you went to see your friends decorated and where you strolled about the central court to show your children aeroplanes and cannon captured from the Germans. And you were saddened by the thought that when the last veterans of the Crimea and Soixante-Dix and colonial wars disappeared, there would be thousands of others to take the vacant places.

October is chestnut month. From some mysterious source the venders drew their supply of charcoal when we could not get it. But we were glad of their luck. Autumn walks would not be complete without the bag of roasted chestnuts which I could fish out of Herbert's overcoat pocket.

We were going down the Rue de Rennes one night and stopped to get our chestnuts from the man at the corner of the Rue Sainte-Placide. Herbert was fumbling for coppers. A boy thrust a newspaper under his nose.

"The Liberation of Lille!" he cried.

We hailed a taxi and made for the Chatham bar. Everything comes to him who waits. Uncle Alex's friend was waiting.

CHAPTER XXXIII
ARMISTICE NIGHT

ON the eleventh day of the eleventh month at the eleventh hour, Paris heard the news. The big guns of Mont ValÉrian and the forts of Ivry roared. The anti-aircraft cannon of the Buttes-Chaumont, Issy-les-Moulineaux, the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and the Place de la Bastille took up the message. The submarine moored by the Pont de la Concorde spoke for the navy. And then the church bells began to ring. We had heard the tocsin sounded by those same bells at four o'clock on the afternoon of August 1, 1914. France to arms! We had heard those same cannon during more than four years announcing the arrival of Tauben and Zeppelins and Gothas over Paris. But Paris kept the faith and never doubted that this day would come. The armistice was signed. The war was over. The victory was ours.

In the Rue Campagne-PremiÈre artists' studios are in the buildings with workingmen's lodgings. House painter and canvas painter work side by side; writer and printer and book-binder, sculptor, cobbler, and mattress maker live in the same court. Our little community could exist by itself, for we have within a few hundred feet all that we need, tailor and laundress, baker and butcher, restaurant and milk woman, the stationer who sells newspapers and notions, and the hardware shop where artists' materials can be had. During these years of danger and discouragement and depression we have exchanged hopes and fears as we have bought and sold and worked. We have welcomed the permissionniares, we have shared in the bereavements of almost every family, and we have greeted the birth of each baby as if it were our own. I was in my studio when the message of victory arrived. Windows in the large court opened instantly, and then we hurried down the staircase to pour forth, hand in hand, arm in arm, into the street. We kissed each other. Flags appeared in every window and on every vehicle.

The Boulevard du Montparnasse was ablaze with flags and bunting, and processions were forming. Hands reached out to force me into line. I managed to break away when I got to the door of my home for the crowd paused to salute the huge American flag. Herbert, who had reached the apartment first, was hanging from our balcony. My four children were in the hall when the elevator stopped. School had been dismissed. They danced around me. Mimi the five-year-old cried: "No more Gothas, no more submarines, we can go home to see grandma, and the Americans finished the war!"

"It is peace, Mimi, peace!" I said.

"What is peace?" asked Mimi bewildered.

I tried to explain. She could not understand. The world since she began to talk and receive ideas had been air raids and bombardments, and life was the mighty effort to kill Germans, who were responsible for all that, and also for the fact that there was not enough butter and milk and sugar. Mimi knew no more about peace than she did about cake and boxes of candy and white bread. Questioning my seven year old, I found that his notions of a world in which men would not fight were as vague as Mimi's. Lloyd was frankly puzzled. Like Mimi, he believed that the armistice meant no more Gothas and no more submarines, but he thought surely that we would go on fighting the Germans. Had not they always been fighting us? And if we weren't going to fight them any longer, chasing them back to their own country, what in the world would we do? And how could Uncle Clem and all the other soldier friends be happy without any work?

The Artist dropped in for lunch. Together we had seen the war suddenly come upon France. Together we were to see it as suddenly end. "Do you know," he said, "everyone in the quarter is going to the Grands Boulevards. Taxis have disappeared. The MÉtro and Nord-Sud are jammed. We may have to foot it, like most people, but if we want to see the big celebration, we must get over to the Rive Droite this afternoon."

The Artist was right. As Lester and Herbert and I went down the Boulevard Raspail and the Boulevard Saint-Germain, we seemed to be following the entire population of the Rive Gauche. To cross the bridge was the work of half an hour. We kept near the coping, and had time to see the crew of the submarine Montgolfier engaged in more strenuous work than sailing under the seas. The Montgolfier was brought up to the center of Paris a fortnight before to stimulate subscriptions to the Victory Loan. The Parisians had been allowed to subscribe on board. To-day the crew was busy trying to keep people off without pushing them into the river. The crowd in the Place de la Concorde overflowed to the Champs-ElysÉes and the Tuileries. Boys were climbing over the German tanks. They sat astride the big cannon trophies and invaded the captured aeroplanes parked on the terrace of the Tuileries. Only its steep sides saved the obelisk.

For many months the horses of Marly, guarding the entrance to the Champs-ElysÉes, had been protected by sand-bags and boxed up. A crowd was tearing off the boards and punching holes in the bags. Air raids were a thing of the past, and these hidden treasures were a painful memory which Paris wanted to efface immediately. A gendarme interfered only to point out the danger of the long nails in the ends of the boards. He insisted that the nails should be taken out, and then the boards were given to those who had torn them off. This kindly interference appealed to the good sense of the crowd. Men were putting the boards across their shoulders to parade the poilus triumphantly around the Place. The gendarme was awarded by the honor of a high seat, too.

The statues of the cities of France formed splendid vantage-points, and they were crowded with the agile and venturesome. Lille and Strasbourg, however, were respected. When Lille was delivered last month, the statue had been covered with flowers and wreaths and flags. As it symbolized all the invaded regions, new offerings had been coming each day from the cities and towns that were being freed. In the midst of the joy of the armistice, this tangible evidence of victory was receiving more offerings each hour. We could see people moving towards Lille with arms aloft, in order that flowers should not be crushed in the jam. There was something sublimely pagan about the offerings to the huge statue. And Strasbourg! After nearly half a century, this was Strasbourg's day. The first instinct of the crowd was to tear off the crepe. But the government had taken precautions. Strasbourg was to be unveiled on the day Marshal Foch and his army enter the city. So Strasbourg was protected by a cordon of the Garde Municipale.

On the Rue Royale side of the HÔtel de Coislin, which the American Red Cross occupied since our entry into the war, the proclamation of the mobilization was covered by some thoughtful person with glass. It has remained through these years, defying wind and rain and souvenir-hunters, a constant reminder in the busy thoroughfare of Paris's last Great Day. This afternoon a fresh poster had been put beside it. We read:

INHABITANTS OF PARIS

It is the victory, the triumphal victory! On all the fronts the conquered enemy has laid down his arms. Blood is going to cease flowing.

Let Paris come forth from the proud reserve which has won for her the admiration of the world.

Let us give free course to our joy, to our enthusiasm, and let us keep back our tears.

To witness to our great soldiers and to their incomparable chiefs our infinite gratitude, let us display from all our houses the French colors and those of our Allies.

Our dead can sleep in peace. The sublime sacrifice which they have made of their life for the future of the race and for the safety of France will not be sterile.

For them as for us "the day of glory has arrived."

Vive la RÉpublique!

Vive la France Immortelle!

THE MUNICIPAL COUNCIL.