Part 11 (1/2)
There are people who say that Paris showed no sign of panic when the Germans were at their gates. ”The calmness with which Paris awaits the siege is amazing,” wrote one of my confreres, and he added this phrase: ”There is no sign of panic.” He was right if by panic one meant a noisy fear, of crowds rus.h.i.+ng wildly about tearing out handfuls of their hair, and shrieking in a delirium of terror. No, there was no clamour of despair in Paris when the enemy came close to its gates. But if by panic one may mean a great fear spreading rapidly among great mult.i.tudes of people, infectious as a fell disease so that men ordinarily brave felt gripped with a sudden chill at the heart, and searched desperately for a way of escape from the advancing peril, then Paris was panic-stricken.
I have written many words about the courage of Paris, courage as fine and n.o.ble as anything in history, and in a later chapter of this book I hope to reveal the strength as well as the weakness in the soul of Paris. But if there is any truth in my pen it must describe that exodus by one and a half millions of people who, under the impulse of a great fear--what else was it?--fled by any means and any road from the capital which they love better than any city in the world because their homes are there and their pride and all that has given beauty to their ideals.
In those few days before the menace pa.s.sed the railway stations were stormed and stormed again, throughout the day and night, by enormous crowds such as I had seen on that night of September 2.
Because so many bridges had been blown up and so many lines cut on the way to Calais and Boulogne, in order to hamper the enemy's advance, and because what had remained were being used for the transport of troops, it was utterly impossible to provide trains for these people. Southwards the way was easier, though from that direction also regiments of French soldiers were being rushed up to the danger zone. The railway officials under the pressure of this tremendous strain, did their best to hurl out the population of Paris, somehow and anyhow. For military reasons the need was urgent, The less mouths to feed the better in a besieged city. So when all the pa.s.senger trains had been used, cattle trucks were put together and into them, thanking G.o.d, tumbled fine ladies of France, careless of the filth which stained their silk frocks, and rich Americans who had travelled far to Paris for the sake of safety, who offered great bribes to any man who would yield his place between wooden boards for a way out again, and bourgeois families who had shut up shops from the Rue de la Paix to the Place Pigalle, heedless for once of loss or ruin, but desperate to get beyond the range of German sh.e.l.ls and the horrors of a beleaguered city.
There were tragic individuals in these crowds. I could only guess at some of their stories as they were written in lines of pain about the eyes and mouths of poor old spinsters such as Balzac met hiding their misery in backstairs flats of Paris tenements--they came blinking out into the fierce sunlight of the Paris streets like captive creatures let loose by an earthquake--and of young students who had eschewed delight and lived laborious days for knowledge and art which had been overthrown by war's brutality. All cla.s.ses and types of life in Paris were mixed up in this retreat, and among them were men I knew, so that I needed no guesswork for their stories. For weeks some of them had been working under nervous pressure, keeping ”a stiff upper lip” as it is called to all rumours of impending tragedy. But the contagion of fear had caught them in a secret way, and suddenly their nerves had snapped, and they too had abandoned courage and ideals of duty, slinking, as though afraid of daylight, to stations more closely sieged than Paris would be. Pitiful wrecks of men, and victims of this ruthless war in which the non-combatants have suffered even more sometimes than the fighting men. The neuroticism of the age was exaggerated by writing men--we have seen the spirit of the old blood strong and keen--but neurasthenia is not a myth, and G.o.d knows it was found out and made a torture to many men and women in the city of Paris, when the Great Fear came--closing in with a narrowing circle until it seemed to clutch at the throats of those miserable beings.
There were thousands and hundreds of thousands of people who would not wait for the trains. Along the southern road which goes down to Tours there were sixty unbroken miles of them. They went in every kind of vehicle--taxi-cabs for which rich people had paid fabulous prices, motor-cars which had escaped the military requisition, farmers' carts laden with several families and piles of household goods, shop carts drawn by horses already tired to the point of death, because of the weight of the people who had crowded behind, pony traps, governess carts, and innumerable cycles.
But for the most part the people were on foot, and they trudged along, bravely at first, quite gay, some of them, on the first stage of the march; mothers carrying their babies, fathers hoisting children to their shoulders, families stepping out together. They were of all cla.s.ses, rank and fortune being annihilated by this common tragedy. Elegant women, whose beauty is known in the Paris salons, whose frivolity perhaps in the past was the main purpose of their lives, were now on a level with the peasant mothers of the French suburbs, and with the midinettes of Montmartre--and their courage did not fail them so quickly.
It was a tragic road. At every mile of it there were people who had fainted on the wayside, and poor old people who could go no further but sat down on the banks below the hedges weeping silently or bidding the younger ones go forward and leave them to their fate.
Young women who had stepped out so jauntily at first were footsore and lame, so that they limped along with lines of pain about their lips and eyes. Many of the taxi-cabs, bought at great prices, and many of the motor-cars had broken down and had been abandoned by their owners, who had decided to walk.
Farmers' carts had jolted into ditches and had lost their wheels.
Wheelbarrows, too heavy to trundle, had been tilted up, with all their household goods spilt into the roadway, and the children had been carried further, until at last darkness came, and their only shelter was a haystack in a field under the harvest moon.
I entered Paris again from the south-west, after crossing the Seine where it makes a loop to the north-west beyond the forts of St.
Germain and St. Denis. The way seemed open to the enemy. Always obsessed with the idea that the Germans would come from the east-- the almost fatal error of the French General Staff, Paris had been girdled with forts on that side, from those of Ecouen and Montmorency by the distant ramparts of Ch.e.l.les and Champigny to those of Sucy and Villeneuve--the outer lines of a triple cordon. But on the western side there was next to nothing, and it was a sign to me of the utter unreadiness of France that now at the eleventh hour when I pa.s.sed thousands of men were digging trenches in the roads and fields with frantic haste, and throwing up earthworks along the banks of the Seine. Great G.o.d! that such work should not have been done weeks before and not left like this to a day when the enemy's guns were rumbling through Creil and smas.h.i.+ng back the allied armies in retreat!
It was a pitiful thing to see the deserted houses of the Paris suburbs.
It was as though a plague had killed every human being save those who had fled in frantic haste. Those little villas on the riverside, so coquette in their prettiness, built as love nests and summer-houses, were all shuttered and silent Roses were blowing in their gardens, full- blown because no woman's hand had been to pick them, and spilling their petals on the garden paths. The creeper was crimsoning on the walls and the gra.s.s plots were like velvet carpeting, so soft and deeply green. But there were signs of disorder, of some hurried transmigration. Packing-cases littered the trim lawns and cardboard boxes had been flung about. In one small bower I saw a child's perambulator, where two wax dolls sat staring up at the abandoned house. Their faces had become blotchy in the dew of night, and their little maman with her pigtail had left them to their fate. In another garden a woman's parasol and flower-trimmed hat lay on a rustic seat with an open book beside them. I imagined a lady of France called suddenly away from an old romance of false sentiment by the visit of grim reality--the first sound of the enemy's guns, faint but terrible to startled ears.
”Les Allemands sont tout pres!”
Some harsh voice had broken into the quietude of the garden on the Seine, and the open book, with the sunshade and the hat, had been forgotten in the flight.
Yet there was one human figure here on the banks of the Seine rea.s.suring in this solitude which was haunted by the shadow of fear.
It was a fisherman. A middle-aged man with a straw hat on the back of his head and a big pair of spectacles on the end of his nose, he held out his long rod with a steady hand and waited for a bite, in an att.i.tude of supreme indifference to Germans, guns, hatred, tears and all the miserable stupidities of people who do not fish. He was at peace with the world on this day of splendour, with a golden sun and a blue sky, and black shadows flung across the water from the tree trunks. He stood there, a simple fisherman, as a protest against the failure of civilization and the cowardice in the hearts of men. I lifted my hat to him.
Close to Paris, too, in little market gardens and poor plots of land, women stooped over their cabbages, and old men tended the fruits of the earth. On one patch a peasant girl stood with her hands on her hips staring at her fowls, which were struggling and clucking for the grain she had flung down to them. There was a smile about her lips.
She seemed absorbed in the contemplation of the feathered crowd.
Did she know the Germans were coming to Paris? If so, she was not afraid.
How quiet it was in the great city! How strangely and deadly quiet!
The heels of my two companions, and my own, made a click-clack down the pavements, as though we were walking through silent halls.
Could this be Paris--this city of shuttered shops and barred windows and deserted avenues? There were no treasures displayed in the Rue de la Paix. Not a diamond glinted behind the window panes.
Indeed, there were no windows visible, but only iron sheeting, drawn down like the lids of dead men's eyes.
In the Avenue de l'Opera no Teutonic tout approached us with the old familiar words, ”Want a guide, sir?” ”Lovely ladies, sir!” The lovely ladies had gone. The guides had gone. Life had gone out of Paris.