CHAPTER IX FRANCE
Notes taken while Motoring on the Riviera.
Mentone.
In the southern sunshine it is a strain to realise that France is at war, that, in the north, the biggest war the world has ever seen is being fought out desperately day after day. The only unusual sight is the groups of Senegalais, the French Colonial soldiers, and the blackest niggers I have ever seen, walking at leisure on the parade with a curious movement of the arms and of the whole body, which reminds one, at the same time, of a bear in his cage and the balancing efforts of a dancer on the tight-rope. They are waiting expectantly to be sent to the battlefield, and in the meantime enjoying themselves, walking about holding each other's hands, and laughing at everything with a wide, good-natured laugh. Everybody likes them and spoils them. To see the Senegalais walking amongst the palm trees under the tropical sky of Mentone, clad in dark blue with the wide scarlet belt round their waists, is really a pleasure to the eyes.
They look and feel at home. When I see a coloured man or a Chinaman in the Strand I generally feel sorry for the poor beggar; he would be all right in Pernambuco or in Canton, but in London he looks like a violation of the natural order of things. That's why I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the Senegalais of Mentone. Most of them are very fine fellows, well over six feet, and quite a number show wound scars and medals, which prove that they will not be new to fire when they take the field.
In addition to the coloured troops, not many soldiers are seen now in Mentone, as the wounded sent down here are still in the hospitals, and only very few risk the air. But a few may be seen in the sunshine, surrounded by a small crowd of admiring children and of sympathetic grown-ups of both sexes. The temporary hospitals have been arranged in a number of the larger hotels which were formerly owned by Germans, and prove now most useful and comfortable for the French wounded.
Mentone had during the last few years acquired the fame of being one of the most Germanised towns of France. This sort of pacific invasion was encouraged by the German Government in the hope that Italy would stick to Germany in the long-expected struggle, and she could then have a sort of avant-garde of friends in French territory at the beginning of hostilities. Instead, when the war broke out, after a week's hesitation France withdrew practically the whole of her frontier troops and guns, while Italy was doing the same at the other side.
When the Germans were forced to leave, one of the expelled hotel-keepers, after passing the Italian frontier, which is at a few yards' distance from the last houses of Mentone, showing his fist to the crowd still on French territory, shouted: "Au revoir! In two weeks in Paris!" His hotel has been the only German house in Mentone wrecked by the population.
* * *
Monte Carlo.
In every small town along the Riviera I came across I never failed to ask: "Are there any British wounded here?"
The answer was always the same "No, not yet, but we are expecting some, sir"; or, "Mrs. or Miss So-and-So has offered her villa, with doctors and nurses and everything, so they are bound to come soon."
And this is perfectly true. Everywhere, even in small villages like La Turbie, English ladies have offered to equip their villas as hospitals for British wounded. But no one has been sent yet, and the beautiful houses in that wondrous climate, which would certainly mean a delightful and quick convalescence, still remain empty.
If no use is made of such generous offers the fault will more easily be found in England than in France.
During a long motor trip all along the Upper Corniche Road I saw hundreds of French wounded who have become quite well and will go back to the front in a few days' time.
I spoke to some of them, and all admitted that there is nothing like staying, even for a very short time, on the Riviera to pick one up after the life of the trenches.
Not only wealthy people in their villas, but many among the middle classes and even poor folk find room for convalescent wounded in their homes; a doctor goes round every morning, but all the nursing is done by the families who take charge of the sick men.
Motoring on the Riviera is now a fairly complicated business, in spite of the passports and other documents which everyone now carries. At every control—and there is a control at every village—there are difficulties.
This severity rather surprised me, considering how easily one can get into France from England, Switzerland, or Italy.
The explanation was given me by a lieutenant, who said that, during the last few months, German spies had been pouring into France continuously, either by means of the passports of neutral nations, or by landing in the seaside towns near the frontier from a small boat. This accounts also for the fact that sailing or boating has been forbidden, except in special cases, and for fishing purposes.
The war has affected the Riviera in one curious way. Certain articles have become quite cheap, others more expensive than usual, owing to the fact that the goods service with Paris is infrequent and too slow for perishable stuff, and that Italy, since the war broke out, has stopped any exportation of foodstuffs.
Eggs, cheese, and butter are getting dearer, while flowers, oranges, &c., which generally are exported to Austria, Russia, and England, are now obtainable at extremely low prices.
This last Christmastide the Riviera suffered a famine of Christmas-trees. The young pines used for this purpose generally arrive in large quantities during the week preceding Christmas and come from Col di Tenda, on the other side of the frontier.
But wood is amongst the things the exportation of which from Italy has been stopped, and as it was too late to get pines from somewhere else, the children, for the most part, had to be content with curious substitutes; while the Senegalais in Mentone had their first, and let us hope last, Christmas-tree made with a huge laurel.
Life is altogether considerably cheaper than usual in Monte Carlo, at least for the winter visitors. Most of the hotels have reduced their tariffs, and I could name more than one very first-class house which, probably for the first time in their existence, have quoted en pension terms.
Summer is naturally the quiet season on the Riviera, and it is then that Monte Carlo proceeds with her yearly toilet, undergoes transformations and improvements. Quite a number of embellishments had just been started when the war broke out, and at the moment these constructions remain unfinished, waiting for quieter times.
For instance, the familiar square in front of the Casino, and the Hotel de Paris, with its lawns and flower-beds, has become an enormous hole, an excavation which looks like a quarry. In a day still distant it will become an underground garage in which the cars of the visitors of the Casino can wait instead of crowding all along the Avenue des Palmiers.
The work, which was begun last summer and should have been finished by December, was interrupted by the war. The Casino is open, with Louis Ganne, of "Marche Lorraine" fame, Caruso, and all the other great artists. None of the usual Russian and American customers are seen in the salles-de-jeu.
When I entered the roulette room the gambling was very slack. There were only eight or nine people round the green table. Three old ladies of the special kind one sees only in the Casinos of the Riviera—blonde wig, wrinkles patiently filled up with pink paint, and a small, sickly dog emerging from a fur-lined bag—were playing very methodically with very small stakes; two Americans were staking high and losing a fair amount; an elderly Englishman of the retired major type was going en plein every now and again after consulting each time a small red-bound book, in which all the en pleins of perhaps twenty years were marked, while a party of Spaniards, evidently new to the green table, were playing irregularly in a foolish way and losing nearly every time.
A young French artillery officer, still limping, and with his right arm suspended by a black silk bandage, entered the room, came straight to the table and put two louis on the 14 a second or so before the rien ne va plus was pronounced.
The little ball stopped on the 15.
A lady who was with the officer excitedly pinched his undamaged arm.
"You never listened to me, Jean," she called out. "You forgot the little mark on your left shoulder."
Everyone within earshot, the imperturbable croupier included, smiled. The officer himself joined in, and could not help giving some explanation.
"My wife," he said, "insisted on putting my money on the number corresponding to the number of my wounds. I have fourteen to speak of, but I did not count a tiny scratch which a bullet made on my left shoulder."
Then, addressing his wife: "The next time I come back we will count everything. We'll get an en plein then!"
* * *
Nice.
Though the affluence of foreign people at Nice is, this year, greatly reduced, the population of the town is perhaps higher than when the season is in full swing.
Nice has, this year, an unusual class of guests, people who, up to a few months ago, used to think of Nice as a sort of earthly paradise reserved to the plutocracy of the new and old world, and who would never have seen the Côte d'Azur if the war had not chased them from their homes in the east of France and in Belgium.
Nice has, at the present moment, five or six thousand refugees, and more are expected. I saw groups of them walking along the long dusty road that runs at the side of the Paillon, the little torrent which, in winter, looks quite a respectable river.
Here is nothing of the Nice that English people know; no hotels, no palm trees, no flower-beds, no smart shops.
The town in its eastern part has preserved its look of sixty years ago, the only new constructions being two huge hive-like barracks. It is probably uglier and dirtier than the commercial quarter of Marseilles itself.
The refugees have chosen as their favourite promenade this dingy quarter. Here they meet the soldiers who are coming back or are going to their country, here the Corporation of Nice distributes twice a day free soup to the poor.
The refugees are not often seen in the smart part of the town. The Promenade des Anglais, the Jetée, and the Place Massena are a background too much in contrast with their ragged clothes. They don't care to walk near the well-dressed people lounging in basket-chairs along the promenade.
Most of the refugees have taken with them all they could manage to carry, and it is touching to see how, amongst all their troubles, seldom have they forgotten the little mongrel dog, faithful companion in the happy days before the war.
I was contemplating the refugees, and walking down the irregular pavement of a Genoese-looking street, when a strange sight met my eyes.
Behind a brick wall an extraordinary structure of long wooden bars, osiers, canes, wire-work, and such-like material, emerged and reached a height of perhaps twenty feet.
After a minute's uncertitude, I remembered that I was in Nice, the motherland of the famous Carnival. This complicated construction could only be the skeleton of His Majesty King Carnival himself, the jolly deity who presides at the Riviera winter festivities.
"I thought you always burnt your King Carnival at the end of the season," I said to a native. "How is it that you preserved last year's dummy?"
"This, sir," he answered, "is not the last Roi Carnival, but the next Roi Carnival. Nobody thought we were going to take him round the town this year, but we shall probably have him finished up with canvas and plaster all the same.
"Of course, it will not be one of our great Carnivals; we have no money to throw away this winter, but His Majesty will go round the streets with a German helmet on his head and two upstanding moustaches, and everybody will enjoy more than usual the moment, at the beginning of Lent, when the figure will be set on fire."
Really, Nice does not look like a town which will, this year, have festivities of any kind. There are too many wounded and too many hospitals; the restrictions imposed by the Government are too strict, and the people do not seem to want any such amusement. Most of the luxury shops remain closed, and there is no chance of having an opera season or the famous Veglione at the Opera.
When walking about in Nice one gets the impression that France's military resources are almost unlimited. I don't know how many soldiers are in the town at the present moment, but certainly more than half the men one meets in the streets are in uniform. The long, straight Avenue de la Gare, the Oxford Street of Nice, is the favourite promenade of the military element.
Chasseurs des Alpes and Turcos, Colonial troops and helmeted cavalry, lend a gay look to the wide, handsome street, and the red and gold of their uniforms moving about in all directions reminds one of the bright setting of a patriotic ballet.
Here are the offices of the leading local newspaper. The latest war news is written in large characters on a huge board hanging from the second-floor windows. A permanent crowd waits there, commenting on the cables, with an astonishing abundance of gestures, in a curious mixed dialect of Italian, French, and Provençal.
Inside the offices is a sort of picture gallery. Photographs of all the officers and soldiers, natives of Nice who have fallen during the war, with a record of their deeds, and newspaper cuttings about them, sometimes in English as well as in French, are hung round the room, to the respectful admiration of the people.
Pious hands daily place fresh flowers beneath these photographs. All the men inspect the collection with hats off. An old lady placed some superb white roses round the picture of a young lieutenant; a black-haired young girl of the working-class went round with a bunch of scarlet carnations, and decorated the photos of those soldiers who had no other fresh flowers.
* * *
Paris, February.
"Paris is desperately dull," said a club acquaintance whose weakness it is to affect a blasé manner. He made the remark to me just before I left London, he being newly returned from a tour in France. "Nothing on; nothing left of what we call Paris! It is really the most boring place on earth."
So it would be for most people, I am afraid—people who have always refused to see Paris as it is, but who pretend to see it as a town in which pleasure and habits, life and morals, are abnormal, different, and possibly opposite to those of all other places on earth.
Such people have never seen—or, at any rate, never understood Paris. They have only seen the gay if somewhat professional, amusing if somewhat vulgar, mask the capital of France shows to most foreigners who do not trouble or who do not wish to see her real face.
At the moment of the declaration of war this mask suddenly dropped, and Paris appeared to the few foreigners who were there at that time to be completely altered; anxiety instead of cynicism; patriotism instead of that curious pose of French people which makes them enjoy running down their rulers and reading about Government scandals.
All these sentiments, which were either asleep or kept concealed because they were thought to be much too vieux jeux, came out again. The motto of Republican France, Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité (which appears so often on the buildings of Paris), ceased to sound ironic and anachronistic.
Maybe all this seems extremely boring to the more or less real viveur, who cannot conceive Paris without cafés du nuit and absinthe, shocking little theatres, and all the rest of Parisian pleasures which are by no means only Parisian nowadays, and which, in any case, are mostly organised for foreigners and by foreigners.
To my eyes, Paris has never been so wonderful a city as since the war broke out.
I saw it astonished and overrun by the mobilising troops at the beginning of the war; ready to fight the invaders and to again undergo the calamities of 1871, when the investment of the town appeared unavoidable; full of hope when the tide of the German advance was suddenly stopped, not a day too soon; decided to make all efforts and sacrifices to end the war as soon and as gloriously as possible now that everybody in France is certain of final victory.
It is certainly impossible in hurried notes of this kind to try and analyse Paris in 1915. It is a subject fit for treatment only in a book, and a large book, too. The new wave of sincerity and self-sacrifice has swept away habits and men, affectation and vices; and one feels that in the future Paris will never again be quite the same as before the war.
Forty-five years ago the siege destroyed for ever the society Zola has snapshotted for us in the "Rougon-Macquard." Probably Paris will come out of the present crisis purified of the arrivistes, politicians, snobs, and pseudo-artists that we all know, thanks to French literature and the French theatre of to-day.
Then there will be room for a new society, possibly as bad as the former, and, for a few writers, not quite as entertaining to write about.