Part 25 (1/2)
4
For several months there was a spy mania in Paris, and the police, acting under military orders, showed considerable activity in ”Boche”
hunting. It was a form of chase which turned me a little sick when I saw the captured prey, just as I used to turn sick as a boy when I saw a rat caught in a trap and handed over to the dogs, or any other animal run to earth. All my instincts made me hope for the escape of the poor beast, vermin though it might be.
One day as I was sitting in the Cafe Napolitain on one of my brief excursions to Paris from the turmoil in the wake of war, I heard shouts and saw a crowd of people rus.h.i.+ng towards a motor-car coming down the Boulevard des Italiens. One word was repeated with a long-drawn sibilance:
”Espion! Espion!”
The spy was between two agents de police. He was bound with cords and his collar had been torn off, so that his neck was bare, like a man ready for the guillotine. Somehow, the look of the man reminded me in a flash of those old scenes in the French Revolution, when a French aristocrat was taken in a tumbril through the streets of Paris.
He was a young man with a handsome, clear-cut face, and though he was very white except where a trickle of blood ran down his cheek from a gash on his forehead, he smiled disdainfully with a proud curl of the lip. He knew he was going to his death, but he had taken the risk of that when he stayed in Paris for the sake of his country. A German spy! Yes, but a brave man who went rather well to his death through the sunlit streets of Paris, with the angry murmurs of a crowd rising in waves about him.
On the same night I saw another episode of this spy-hunting period, and it was more curious. It happened in a famous restaurant not far from the Comedie Francaise, where a number of French soldiers in a variety of uniforms dined with their ladies before going to the front after a day's leave from the fighting lines. Suddenly, into the buzz of voices and above the tinkle of gla.s.ses and coffee-cups one voice spoke in a formal way, with clear, deliberate words. I saw that it was the manager of the restaurant addressing his clients.
”Messieurs et Mesdames,---My fellow-manager has just been arrested on a charge of espionage. I have been forbidden to speak more than these few words, to express my personal regret that I am unable to give my personal attention to your needs and pleasure.”
With a bow this typical French ”patron”--surely not a German spy!-- turned away and retreated from the room. A look of surprise pa.s.sed over the faces of the French soldiers. The ladies raised their pencilled eyebrows, and then--so quickly does this drama of war stale after its first experience--continued their conversation through whiffs of cigarette smoke.
5
But it was not of German spies that the French Government was most afraid. Truth to tell, Paris was thronged with Germans, naturalized a week or two before the war and by some means or other on the best of terms with the police authorities, in spite of spy- hunts and spy-mania, which sometimes endangered the liberty of innocent Englishmen, and Americans more or less innocent. It was only an accident which led to the arrest of a well-known milliner whose afternoon-tea parties among her mannequins were attended by many Germans with business in Paris of a private character.
When this lady covered up the Teutonic name of her firm with a Red Cross flag and converted her showrooms into a hospital ward, excellently supplied except with wounded men, the police did not inquire into the case until a political scandal brought it into the limelight of publicity.
The French Government was more afraid of the true Parisians. To sober them down in case their spirit might lead to trouble, the streets of Paris were kept in darkness and all places of amus.e.m.e.nt were closed as soon as war was declared. In case riots should break forth from secret lairs of revolutionary propaganda, squadrons of Gardes Republicains patrolled the city by day and night, and the agents de police were reinforced by fusiliers marins with loaded rifles, who-- simple fellows as they are--could hardly direct a stranger to the Place de la Concorde or find their own way to the Place de la Bastille.
At all costs Paris was not to learn the truth about the war if there were any unpleasant truths to tell. For Paris there must always be victories and no defeats. They must not even know that in war time there were wounded men; otherwise they might get so depressed or so enraged that (thought the French Government) there might be the old cry of ”Nous sommes trahis!” with a lopping off of Ministers' heads and dreadful orgies in which the streets of Paris would run red with blood.
This reason alone--so utterly unreasonable, as we now know--may explain the farcical situation of the hospitals in Paris during the first two months of the war. Great hotels like the Astoria, Claridge's, and the Majestic had been turned into hospitals magnificently equipped and over-staffed. Nothing that money could buy was left unbought, so that these great palaces might be fully provided with all things necessary for continual streams of wounded men. High society in France gave away its wealth with generous enthusiasm. Whatever faults they might have they tried to wash them clean by charity, full- hearted and overflowing, for the wounded sons of France. Great ladies who had been the beauties of the salons, whose gowns had been the envy of their circles, took off their silks and chiffons and put on the simple dress of the infirmiere and volunteered to do the humblest work, the dirty work of kitchen-wenches and scullery-girls and bedroom-maids, so that their hands might help, by any service, the men who had fought for France. French doctors, keen and brilliant men who hold a surgeon's knife with a fine and delicate skill, stood in readiness for the maimed victims of the war. The best brains of French medical science were mobilized in these hospitals of Paris.
But the wounded did not come to Paris until the war had dragged on for weeks. After the battle of the Marne, when the wounded were pouring into Orleans and other towns at the rate of seven thousand a day, when it was utterly impossible for the doctors there to deal with all that tide of agony, and when the condition of the French wounded was a scandal to the name of a civilized country, the hospitals of Paris remained empty, or with a few lightly wounded men in a desert of beds. Because they could not speak French, perhaps, these rare arrivals were mostly Turcos and Senegalese, so that when they awakened in these wards and their eyes rolled round upon the white counterpanes, the exquisite flowers and the painted ceilings, and there beheld the beauty of women bending over their bedsides-- women whose beauty was famous through Europe--they murmured ”Allahu akbar” in devout ecstasy and believed themselves in a Mohammedan paradise.
It was a comedy in which there was a frightful tragedy. The doctors and surgeons standing by these empty beds, wandering through operating-theatres magnificently appointed, asked G.o.d why their hands were idle when so many soldiers of France were dying for lack of help, and why Paris, the nerve-centre of all railway lines, so close to the front, where the fields were heaped with the wreckage of the war, should be a world away from any work of rescue. It was the same old strain of falsity which always runs through French official life. ”Politics!” said the doctors of Paris; ”those cursed politics!”
But it was fear this time. The Government was afraid of Paris, lest it should lose its nerve, and so all trains of wounded were diverted from the capital, wandering on long and devious journeys, side-tracked for hours, and if any ambulances came it was at night, when they glided through back streets under cover of darkness, afraid of being seen.
They need not have feared, those Ministers of France. Paris had more courage than some of them, with a greater dignity and finer faith. When the French Ministry fled to Bordeaux without having warned the people that the enemy was at their gates, Paris remained very quiet and gave no sign of wild terror or of panic-stricken rage.
There was no political cry or revolutionary outburst. No mob orator sprang upon a cafe chair to say ”Nous sommes trahis!” There was not even a word of rebuke for those who had doctored the official communiques and put a false glamour of hope upon hideous facts.
Hurriedly and dejectedly over a million people of Paris fled from the city, now that the Government had led the way of flight. They were afraid, and there was panic in their exodus, but even that was not hysterical, and men and women kept their heads, though they had lost their hopes. It was rare to see a weeping woman. There was no wailing of a people distraught. Sadly those fugitives left the city which had been all the world to them, and the roads to the south were black with their mult.i.tudes, having left in fear but full of courage on the road, dejected, but even then finding a comedy in the misery of it, laughing --as most French women will laugh in the hour of peril--even when their suffering was greatest and when there was a heartache in their humour.
6
After all the soul of Paris did not die, even in those dark days when so many of its inhabitants had gone, and when, for a little while, it seemed a deserted city. Many thousands of citizens remained, enough to make a great population, and although for a day or two they kept for the most part indoors, under the shadow of a fear that at any moment they might hear the first sh.e.l.ls come shrieking overhead, or even the clatter of German cavalry, they quickly resumed the daily routine of their lives, as far as it was possible at such a time. The fruit and vegetable-stalls along the Rue St. Honore were thronged as usual by frugal housewives who do their shopping early, and down by Les Halles, to which I wended my way through the older streets of Paris, to note any change in the price of food, there were the usual scenes of bustling activity among the baskets and the litter of the markets. Only a man who knew Paris well could detect a difference in the early morning crowds--the absence of many young porters who used to carry great loads on their heads before quenching their thirst at the Chien Qui Fume, and the presence of many young girls of the midinette cla.s.s, who in normal times lie later in bed before taking the metro to their shops.
The shops were closed now. Great establishments like the Galeries Lafayette had disbanded their armies of girls and even many of the factories in the outer suburbs, like Charenton and La Villette, had suspended work, because their mechanics and electricians and male factory hands had been mobilized at the outset of the war. The women of Paris were plunged into dire poverty, and thousands of them into idleness, which makes poverty more awful. Even now I can hardly guess how many of these women lived during the first months of the war. There were many wives who had been utterly dependent for the upkeep of their little homes upon men who were now earning a sou a day as soldiers of France, with glory as a pourboire. So many old mothers had been supported by the devotion of sons who had denied themselves marriage, children, and the little luxuries of life in order that out of their poor wages in Government offices they might keep the woman to whom they owed their being. Always the greater part of the people of Paris lives precariously on the thin edge of a limited income, stinting and sc.r.a.ping, a sou here, a sou there, to balance the week's accounts and eke out a little of that joie de vivre, which to every Parisian is an essential need. Now by the edict of war all life's economies had been annihilated. There were no more wages out of which to reckon the cost of an extra meal, or out of which to squeeze the price of a seat at a Pathe cinema. Mothers and wives and mistresses had been abandoned to the chill comfort of national charity, and oh, the coldness of it!
The French Government had promised to give an allowance of 1 franc 25 centimes a day to the women who were dependent on soldier husbands. Perhaps it is possible to live on a s.h.i.+lling a day in Paris, though, by Heaven, I should hate to do it. Nicely administered it might save a woman from rapid starvation and keep her thin for quite a time. But even this measure of relief was difficult to get. French officials are extraordinarily punctilious over the details of their work, and it takes them a long time to organize a system which is a masterpiece of safeguards and regulations and subordinate clauses.
So it was with them in the first weeks of the war, and it was a pitiable thing to watch the long queues of women waiting patiently outside the mairies, hour after hour and sometimes day after day, to get that one franc twenty-five which would buy their children's bread. Yet the patience of these women never failed, and with a resignation which had something divine in it, they excused the delays, the official deliberations, the infinite vexations which they were made to suffer, by that phrase which has excused everything in France: ”C'est la guerre!” Because it was war, they did not raise their voices in shrill protest, or wave their skinny arms at imperturbable men who said, ”Attendez, s'il vous plait!” with d.a.m.nable iteration, or break the windows of Government offices in which bewildering regulations were drawn up in miles of red tape.