Part 26 (1/2)

Khaki came to Paris, too, and although it was worn by many who did not hold the King's commission but swaggered it as something in the Red Cross--G.o.d knows what!--the drab of its colour gave a thrill to all those people of Paris who, at least in the first months of the war, were stirred with an immense sentiment of grat.i.tude because England had come to the rescue in her hour of need, and had given her blood generously to France, and had cemented the Entente Cordiale with deathless ties of comrades.h.i.+p. ”Comme ils sont chics, ces braves anglais!” They did not soon tire of expressing their admiration for the ”chic” style of our young officers, so neat and clean-cut and workmanlike, with their brown belts and brown boots, and khaki riding breeches.

”Ulloh... Engleesh boy? Ahlright, eh?” The b.u.t.terfly girls hovered about them, spread their wings before those young officers from the front and those knights of the Red Cross, tempted them with all their wiles, and led them, too many of them, to their mistress Circe, who put her spell upon them.

At every turn in the street, or under the trees of Paris, some queer little episode, some startling figure from the great drama of the war arrested the interest of a wondering spectator. A glimpse of tragedy made one's soul shudder between two smiles at the comedy of life.

Tears and laughter chased each other through Paris in this time of war.

”Coupe gorge, comme ca. Sale boche, mort. Sa tete, voyez. Tombe a terre. Sang! Mains, en bain de sang. Comme ca!”

So the Turco spoke under the statue of Aphrodite in the gardens of the Tuileries to a crowd of smiling men and girls. He had a German officer's helmet. He described with vivid and disgusting gestures how he had cut off the man's head--he clicked his tongue to give the sound of it--and how he had bathed his hands in the blood of his enemy, before carrying this trophy to his trench. He held out his hands, staring at them, laughing at them as though they were still crimson with German blood. ... A Frenchwoman s.h.i.+vered a little and turned pale. But another woman laughed--an old creature with toothless gums--with a shrill, harsh note.

”Sale race!” she said; ”a dirty race! I should be glad to cut a German throat!”

Outside the Invalides, motor-cars were always arriving at the headquarters of General Galieni. French staff officers came at full speed, with long shrieks on their motor-horns, and little crowds gathered round the cars to question the drivers.

”ca marche, la guerre? Il y a du progres?”

British officers came also, with dispatches from headquarters, and two soldiers with loaded rifles in the back seats of cars that had been riddled with bullets and pock-marked with shrapnel.

Two of these men told their tale to me. They had left the trenches the previous night to come on a special mission to Paris, and they seemed to me like men who had been in some torture chamber and suffered unforgettable and nameless horrors. Splashed with mud, their faces powdered with a greyish clay and chilled to the bone by the sharp shrewd wind of their night near Soissons and the motor journey to Paris, they could hardly stand, and trembled and spoke with chattering teeth.

”I wouldn't have missed it,” said one of them, ”but I don't want to go through it again. It's absolutely infernal in those trenches, and the enemy's sh.e.l.l-fire breaks one's nerves.”

They were not ashamed to confess the terror that still shook them, and wondered, like children, at the luck--the miracle of luck--which had summoned them from their place in the firing-line to be the escort of an officer to Paris, with safe seats in his motor-car.

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For several weeks of the autumn while the British were at Soissons, many of our officers and men came into Paris like this, on special missions or on special leave, and along the boulevards one heard all accents of the English tongue from John o' Groats to Land's End and from Peckham Rye to Hackney Downs. The Kilties were the wonder of Paris, and their knees were under the fire of a mult.i.tude of eyes as they went swinging to the Gare du Nord The shopgirls of Paris screamed with laughter at these brawny lads in ”jupes,” and surrounded them with shameless mirth, while Jock grinned from ear to ear and Sandy, more bashful, coloured to the roots of his fiery hair.

Cigarettes were showered into the hands of these soldier lads. They could get drunk for nothing at the expense of English residents of Paris--the jockeys from Chantilly, the bank clerks of the Imperial Club, the bar loungers of the St. Petersbourg. The temptation was not resisted with the courage of Christian martyrs. The Provost-Marshal had to threaten some of his own military police with the terrors of court-martial.

The wounded were allowed at last to come to Paris, and the surgeons who had stood with idle hands found more than enough work to do, and the ladies of France who had put on nurses' dresses walked very softly and swiftly through long wards, no longer thrilled with the beautiful sentiment of smoothing the brows of handsome young soldiers, but thrilled by the desperate need of service, hard and ugly and terrible, among those poor b.l.o.o.d.y men, agonizing through the night, helpless in their pain, moaning before the rescue of death. The faint-hearted among these women fled panic-stricken, with blanched faces, to Nice and Monte Carlo and provincial chateaux, where they played with less unpleasant work. But there were not many like that. Most of them stayed, nerving themselves to the endurance of those tragedies, finding in the weakness of their womanhood a strange new courage, strong as steel, infinitely patient, full of pity cleansed of all false sentiment. Many of these fine ladies of France, in whose veins ran the blood of women who had gone very bravely to the guillotine, were animated by the spirit of their grandmothers and by the ghosts of French womanhood throughout the history of their country, from Genevieve to Sister Julie, and putting aside the frivolity of life which had been their only purpose, faced the filth and horrors of the hospitals without a shudder and with the virtue of nursing nuns.

Into the streets of Paris, therefore, came the convalescents and the lightly wounded, and one-armed or one-legged officers or simple poilus with bandaged heads and hands could be seen in any restaurant among comrades who had not yet received their baptism of fire, had not cried ”Touche!” after the bursting of a German sh.e.l.l.

It was worth while to spend an evening, and a louis, at Maxim's, or at Henry's, to see the company that came to dine there when the German army was still entrenched within sixty miles of Paris. They were not crowded, those places of old delight, and the gaiety had gone from them, like the laughter of fair women who have pa.s.sed beyond the river. But through the swing doors came two by two, or in little groups, enough people to rob these lighted rooms of loneliness.

Often it was the woman who led the man, lending him the strength of her arm. Yet when he sat at table--this young officer of the Cha.s.seurs in sky-blue jacket, or this wounded Dragoon with a golden casque and long horse-hair tail--hiding an empty sleeve against the woman's side, or concealing the loss of a leg beneath the table cloth, it was wonderful to see the smile that lit up his face and the absence of all pain in it.

”Ah! comme il fait bon!”

I heard the sigh and the words come from one of these soldiers--not an officer but a fine gentleman in his private's uniform--as he looked round the room and let his brown eyes linger on the candle-lights and the twinkling gla.s.ses and snow-white table-cloths. Out of the mud and blood of the trenches, with only the loss of an arm or a leg, he had come back to this sanctuary of civilization from which ugliness is banished and all grim realities.

So, for this reason, other soldiers came on brief trips to Paris from the front. They desired to taste the fine flavour of civilization in its ultra- refinement, to dine delicately, to have the fragrance of flowers about them, to sit in the glamour of shaded lights, to watch a woman's beauty through the haze of cigarette-smoke, and to listen to the music of her voice. There was always a woman by the soldier's side, propping her chin in her hands and smiling into the depths of his eyes. For the soul of a Frenchman demands the help of women, and the love of women, however strong his courage or his self-reliance.

The beauty of life is to him a feminine thing, holding the spirit of motherhood, romantic love and comrades.h.i.+p more intimate and tender than between man and man. Only duty is masculine and hard.

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