War's Dark Frame/Paris and Its War Spirit

by Charles Wadsworth Camp

CHAPTER IV

PARIS AND ITS WAR SPIRIT

EACH trip through the submarine zone, in fact, has its thrill until you grow, to a measure, hardened. When I was ready to leave for France the channel crossing seemed for a number of reasons less pleasant than usual. Only one line was in operation, and that was taking the long route from Southampton to Havre. That the Sussex tragedy had had something to do with the choice was obvious. People spoke of the approaching excursion with misgivings. The antidote for most of them, it is likely, was the extended formalities they had to accomplish before they were permitted to risk their lives at all. The police, the American consul, the French consul, local detectives, Scotland Yard agents, and French secret service men—those were some of the obstacles to dishonest travel between the continent and England.

I was amused when I drove with my baggage to the pier entrance in Southampton. I had been conducted that afternoon by the courtesy of the Admiralty through one of the great dockyards. Therefore, I didn't come down from London on the special train with the rest of the passengers.

At a stated hour the gate was thrown open and I was permitted to drive in after an examination of passports. I found an elderly porter in front of the ticket office. I asked him to take my lug. gage from the cab. As the result of extended and silent consideration he agreed, apparently against his better judgment. While he worked he shook his head continually.

I turned to enter the ticket office. He grasped my arm. His gesture and his face expressed a desire to spare me an indiscretion. This time he spoke.

"Where you off to, sir?"

"To buy my ticket for France."

I am convinced he was a Wesleyan. I have never seen a longer face.

“Better not do that, sir," he said mournfully, until you find out whether you're going."

I laughed and walked on. He called after me with the effect of pursuing an erring soul. With each word his voice grew shriller.

"Very often they don't go, sir. I tell you, they don't go. They stops 'em at the dock."

I was tired, so, when I was aboard the boat, I entered my bunk; but sleep was nearly out of the question because of that justifiable care and sever ity of which the old porter had warned me. Men and women struggled through until just before dawn. At times they complained loudly. At others they congratulated themselves in equally unrestrained voices. The idea of slecping occurred to few. The man who shared my cabin went to bed with his shoes on. Perhaps he was wise.

There wasn't much talk after breakfast. The passengers sat or walked about, anxiously scanning the water. The coast of France emerged from the haze. We passed the skeleton masts of several ships, sunk by submarines. We made the harbour entrance, and spirits revived. Such chatter as last night's disturbed the boat again. People wondered if there would be at the dock a new ordeal. There was, for France is as careful and suspicious as England.

It was one of those hot, brilliant days Normandy receives occasionally. The harbour, untroubled by the slightest breeze, was like a mirror for the violent sun.

We were herded in a shed of a single story on the water front. A tall military policeman with bristling moustaches guarded the gate to the examination room. Beyond him we had glimpses of a long deal table, around which sat numerous inquisitors, in uniform and out, French and British.

Because of the crowd in the little room it was impossible to put down one's coat and hand bags. Their weight increased momentarily as the un- clouded sun baked the flimsy roof overhead. Many of us commenced to look as if we were more in need of a physician's certificate than one of entry. Then at a grumbled word from the inquisitors the proceedings opened.

With a commendable partiality the huge military policeman roared:

“Ladies first ! Step forward, and don't push abawt so. Now, lady. You got your passport ready?"

There were more women than one would have thought. Because of the increasing heat and the weight of baggage the situation had approached the intolerable when the military policeman cried out:

“No more ladies?"

Suspense! A sigh of relief as the silence persisted! We who were not at the front of the line began to compute the duration of our ordeal. А groan disturbed our ranks, for the military policeman was following evidently an extended order of precedence.

"All with diplomatic passports," came his leonine voice, " kindly step forward."

And, after a number of important-appearing men had been passed through:

“Are there any more with diplomatic passports?"

The case was desperate. I called over the heads of the others:

'Sergeant! I have a journalistic passport."

“What?" he thundered back.

"A journalistic passport," I repeated, less hopefully, It meant nothing, and I knew it.

“Let that gentleman through!" he roared.

It was, I felt as I struggled forward, his intention to discipline my presumption with some sharp words and a command to take the rear of the line. His frown was ominous, his bristling moustaches unsympathetic.

Let's see your passport," he growled.

"What do you mean? I asked for diplomatic passports."

I handed him the much viséd document. He glanced it over. A more dangerous belligerency coloured his tone.

"You got an office in London?”

"No," I answered meekly. "I have a sort of an office in New York."

The threat faded from his appearance and his voice. He smiled with a childish and excited interest.

"New York!" he echoed.

He swung the gate open.

Step right in, sir. Make yourself comfortable."

And as I obeyed:

"Why didn't you say that in the first place? I'm from New York not two years ago. Expect to go back after the war, if I don't get killed. I used to run an elevator in the Waldorf. What's the news from Broadway? Give my regards to Times Square."

He was too friendly. I was among the last of the sufferers to be released by him into the hands of the judges.

As at Liverpool the narrow mesh of these spy nets was made apparent. As a farther check, I fancy, we were made to spend nearly seven hours in Havre waiting for the departure of the special train for Paris.

I wasn't sorry, for Havre in itself had plenty of interest. It is the working capital of invaded Belgium. It is one of the great English bases.

Consequently the uniforms of French, Belgians, and British were everywhere in evidence, but the British, naturally, predominated.

From the waterfront I watched transports enter and leave the harbour. On the docks the work of unloading proceeded with a precise efficiency. In the streets, wagons and automobile trucks, to which good-natured Tommies clung, hurried tempestuously. Officers strolled here and there, swinging little canes. Their faces were rather more serious than the faces scanned in London. All at once you realised that you were actually on the soil of war-torn France, within a few miles of the grotesque and deadly battle of the trenches.

And in the train the shadow of the war deepened again. As we steamed inland across a landscape which, for me, had always had an air of sedate pleasuring, we caught glimpses of tents, and the intricate movements of men at battle drill.

Elderly French Territorials in faded blue and red uniforms lined the railroad tracks and guarded the bridges. As our cars flashed past they presented arms or stood at attention. We threaded through great supply trains on temporary tracks in the vicinity of Rouen. The heat was unreal in such a country. It seemed that it must be an off-giving from the great, near-by forge of battle. Then darkness closed over the steaming world, as if to hide from our eager eyes the claborate machinery of war.

At St. Lazarre we passed the last examination and scattered to our hotels.

Curiously, arriving at night as I did, my first impression was that Paris was more nearly normal than London. Almost at once I realised that this was due to the contrast between the few but unveiled street lamps, the unblanketed glow from buildings, and the darkened thoroughfares and the curtained windows of England. In addition there was the difference in the Anglo-Saxon temperament, after all, largely our own, and the admirable Gallic intensity of temporary appreciation which even this war has been powerless to destroy.

The terrasse cafés were crowded, and the many soldiers, wearing their graceful steel helmets, seemed undisturbed by what they had already survived and unappalled by that which awaited them at the close of their brief permissions.

By daylight the truer values obtruded themselves. Nearly every woman wore mourning Their white faces haunted one, because out of the eyes, in which there were no tears, stared a fierce pride that burned up grief.

I talked with one of these women at a simple tea. Her history had been rapidly sketched for me. She was the widow of a colonel who had been wounded in an early battle, and killed almost immediately after his return to duty. Before the war this woman had lived in a charming apartment near the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, the most expensive quarter of Paris. Like many army officers her husband had spent all of his in. come. Now with her child, a nine year old boy, she lived in a single garret room, sewing, by odd jobs striving to maintain the shadow of a home. From the deep frame of mourning her sorrowful face glowed with that pride that has made all Frenchwomen, to an extent, resemble each other. She spoke almost at once, as if there were no other subject worth talking about, of her husband and the manner of his death.

"I was so happy when he came back with his wound for that little time, and when he went I thought the good Lord would let him return again. When they killed him he wasn't painfully hurt, but, you see, the great artery in his thigh was cut. He understood, of course; but his men were in a bad place, so he had them prop him up, and he directed the defence and sent a message to me while he bled to death, knowing all the time, until the light faded—"

She shook her head.

"He shouldn't have gone that way. If Doc tor Carrel had only been there! He's saved such cases.

He need not have died."

And always one asked, Why don't the tears come into this woman's eyes?"

One prayed that they would, and that the stiff, stern figure would relax a little. The gesture with which she raised her tea cup was angular, somnambulistic. The boy stared at her with a round, pallid, and expressionless face.

"You may have another cake, little one," the widow said.

He munched it without words until some one asked:

"And what are you going to do when you grow up, young man?”

His voice was as expressionless as his face.

"I am going to be a soldier, like papa."

The widow made a swift movement.

"You see? And I have had nothing to do with it—nothing at all. It is in the blood of the orphans. Must we lose them, too? Why do you want to be a soldier, son?"

"I want to kill the Germans, because they killed my poor papa."

His face twitched into an expression at last, and, as he continued to sip his tea, great tears rolled down his cheeks and fell into the cup. But the widow didn't cry. In the great munition factories most of the women wore mourning, too, and the eyes of many were disturbingly like the eyes of the widow. It was not easy at first to watch their slender, dark-clothed figures, their soft and pretty faces, bent over tasks of preparing death and mutilation for men. You wanted to turn straightway from the contemplation of their deft fingers pouring shrapnel bullets into completed casings, or from the easy skill with which they moulded and polished ammunition. Then that look and the dryness of their eyes stripped from their labour something of its dreadful incongruity, gave to it a tinge of justifiable revenge. And it was impressed upon the observer more than ever that in the fragile hands of the women lies the power that some day may obliterate war.

It is this grim, matter-of-fact determination of both sexes, of all classes of the French, that arrests one. It is, in a sense, hypnotic. Even from the little boys playing at soldiering in the street it projects itself. For me it found its culmination in a review I watched one afternoon in the Place des Invalides.

Infantry, cavalry, and several batteries of the famous soixante-quinzes filled with sober colour the place where many times Napoleon reviewed his brilliant corps. Eyes wandered from the

quiet, helmeted ranks to the dome of the Invalides beneath which the great emperor lay. His tomb seemed to brood over the review, and in neighbouring faces you read a perception, nearly superstitious, of the soul of the inspired leader who had brought so much glory to France. Then the band burst into the Marseillaise. As the ranks swung over the bridge the crowd cheered. I have never heard such cheering. It wasn't a matter of volume. It was a curious choked quality that arrested one. It was as if these people tried to give vent to an emotion beyond physical expression and were angry at their failure. Yet for them the music seemed to express everything.