XX
January 23, 1916
Well, I have really been to Paris, and it was so difficult that I ask myself why I troubled.
I had to await the pleasure of the commander of the Cinquième Armée, as the Embassy was powerless to help me, although they did their best with great good will. I enclose you my sauf-conduit that you may see what so important a document is like. Then I want to tell you the funny thing—/ never had to show it once. I was very curious to know just how important it was. I went by the way of Esbly. On buying my ticket I expected to be asked for it, as there was a printed notice beside the window to the ticket-office announcing that all purchasers of tickets must be furnished with a sauf-conduit. No one cared to see mine. No one asked for it on the train. No one demanded it at the exit in Paris. Nor, when I returned, did anyone ask for it either at the ticket-office in Paris or at the entrance to the train. Considering that I had waited weeks for it, had to ask for it three times, had to explain what I was going to do in Paris, where I was going to stay, how long, etc., I had to be amused.
I was really terribly disappointed. I had longed to show it. It seemed so chic to travel with the consent of a big general.
Of course, if I had attempted to go without it, I should have risked getting caught, as, at any time, the train was liable to be boarded and all papers examined.
I learned at the Embassy, where the military attaché had consulted the Ministry of War, that an arrangement was to be made later regarding foreigners, and that we were to be provided with a special book which, while it would not allow us to circulate freely, would give us the right to demand a permission—and get it if the military authorities chose. No great change that.
The visit served little purpose except to show me a sad-looking Paris and make me rejoice to get back.
Now that the days are so short, and it is dark at four o'clock, Paris is almost unrecognizable. With shop-shutters closed, tramway windows curtained, very few street-lights—none at all on short streets—no visible lights in houses, the city looks dead. You 'd have to see it to realize what it is like.
The weather was dull, damp, the cold penetrating, and the atmosphere depressing, and so was the conversation. It is better here on the hilltop, even though, now and then, we hear the guns.
Coming back from Paris there were almost no lights on the platforms at the railway stations, and all the coaches had their curtains drawn. At the station at Esbly the same situation—a few lights, very low, on the main platform, and absolutely none on the platform where I took the narrow-gauge for Couilly. I went stumbling, in absolute blackness, across the main track, and literally felt my way along the little train to find a door to my coach. If it had not been for the one lamp on my little cart waiting in the road, I could not have seen where the exit at Couilly was. It was not gay, and it was far from gay climbing the long hill, with the feeble rays of that one lamp to light the blackness. Luckily Ninette knows the road in the dark.
In the early days of the war it used to be amusing in the train, as everyone talked, and the talk was good. Those days are passed. With the now famous order pasted on every window:
Taisez-vous! Méfiez-vous.
Les oreilles ennemies vous écoutent
no one says a word. I came back from Paris with half a dozen officers in the compartment. Each one, as he entered, brought his hand to salute, and sat down, without a word. They did not even look at one another. It is one of the most marked changes in attitude that I have seen since the war. It is right. We were all getting too talkative, but it takes away the one charm there was in going to Paris. I've had no adventures since I wrote to you Christmas Day, although we did have, a few days after that, five minutes of excitement.
One day I was walking in the garden. It was a fairly bright day, and the sun was shining through the winter haze. I had been counting my tulips, which were coming up bravely, admiring my yellow crocuses, already in flower, and hoping the sap would not begin to rise in the rose bushes, and watching the Marne, once more lying like a sea rather than a river over the fields, and wondering how that awful winter freshet was going to affect the battle-front, when, suddenly, there was a terrible explosion. It nearly shook me off my feet.
The letter-carrier from Quincy was just mounting the hill on his wheel, and he promptly tumbled off it. I happened to be standing where I could see over the hedge, but before I could get out the stupid question, "What was that?" there came a second explosion, then a third and a fourth.
They sounded in the direction of Paris.
"Zeppelins," was my first thought, but that was hardly the hour for them.
I stood rooted to the spot. I could hear voices at Voisins, as if all the world had rushed into the street. Then I saw Amélie running down the hill. She said nothing as she passed. The postman picked himself up, passed me a letter, shrugged his shoulders, and pushed his wheel up the hill.
I patiently waited until the voices ceased in Voisins. I could see no smoke anywhere. Amélie came back at once, but she brought no explanation. She only brought a funny story.
There is an old woman in Voisins, well on to ninety, called Mère R—-. The war is too tremendous for her localized mind to grasp. Out of the confusion she picks and clings to certain isolated facts. At the first explosion, she rushed, terrorized, into the street, gazing up to the heavens, and shaking her withered old fists above her head, she cried in her shrill, quavering voice: "Now look at that! They told us the Kaiser was dying. It's a lie. It's a lie, you see, for here he comes throwing his cursed bombs down on us."
You know all this month the papers have had Guillaume dying of that ever-recurring cancer of the throat. I suppose the old woman thinks Guillaume is carrying all this war on in person. In a certain sense she is not very far wrong.
For a whole week we got no explanation of that five minutes' excitement. Then it leaked out that the officer of the General Staff, who has been stationed at the Chateau de Condé, halfway between here and Esbly, was about to change his section. He had, in the park there, four German shells from the Marne battlefield, which had not been exploded. He did not want to take them with him, and it was equally dangerous to leave them in the park, so he decided to explode them, and had not thought it necessary to warn anybody but the railroad people.
It is a proof of how simple our life is that such an event made conversation for weeks.