The raids now came regularly. The nights became hideous nightmares. Lillian and her mother seemed to get their nerve back. When the raids came, they would take their pillows and go into their little foyer, to try to get away from the noise. Dorothy took her pillow, too, but she did not sit on it—she hugged it. Finally, it was September. They had been there three months!
“... You cannot imagine, Nell, what terrible things those big things in the sky are, dropping death wherever they go. If this war would only end.... I am still here, and will live to see you and Tom and the babies again, in spite of it. So don’t worry.”
Lillian went out a good deal, and, as was her habit, made a study of the people ... to see how they acted under the stress and agony of war. She went to the Waterloo Station, to watch them saying good-bye. Always she was watching ... on the street ... everywhere.
XII
FRANCE
Days ... nights ... they seemed to have passed out of any world they had ever known, into a sinister, topsy-turvy world, where murder and destruction ruled.
Griffith down on the Salisbury plain, where there were great camps, was already making portions of the picture. Returning, at last, to London he escorted his little party down to Southampton, to take boat for France. It was a transport, crowded with soldiers. Mrs. Gish and the girls were in one tiny room, two in one bunk. Twice they started, and were sent back because of floating mines. Finally they were at Havre, and next evening at Paris, at the Grand Hotel.
Paris was dark—a place where almost anything could happen—but Griffith and the girls somehow managed to grope their way about, to the river and elsewhere. By daylight they did some shopping.
Griffith got the papers that would permit them to go to the fighting area; then, one morning, with Mrs. Gish, Lillian and Dorothy, and Bobby Harron, set out in an automobile, passed through the gates of Paris. In an article for a home paper, Lillian described their journey:
Paris still has gates, just as you read about in the romantic novels. There is a particular gate that leads to the war zone and not a single, solitary human being can go through it unless he is a soldier, or one who has business in the zone.
Can you imagine how important you feel when you go through that gate? You find it very hard to believe that you are not just acting in a “movie,” in a Los Angeles background that Mr. Huck, the man who builds the moving-picture sets, has built—the road and everything.