Sunday, September 6.
Thirty-fifth day of the war. Ideal September weather, with light easterly wind. Temperature at five P.M. 24 degrees centigrade. The moon is now full.
Instead of making a ferocious attaque brusquée on Paris, the four army corps composing the German right wing are moving southeastward, in a supreme effort to crush the left flank of the French center, which is reported to be engaged with the main German forces near Rethel, striving to cut off and surround the French center, and thus achieve a second, but far more gigantic, Sedan. In any event, the Germans are certainly moving away from Paris to the southeast.
Paris assumes a holiday aspect. Thousands of people made excursions to the suburbs of the city, and particularly to the Bois de Boulogne, to see something of the preparations for the defence. Boys and girls from boarding-schools, under care of their teachers, were among those who watched gangs of men digging wide and deep trenches, while trees that obstructed the ground in the vicinity were being cut down.
The daily crop of Paris newspapers is becoming beautifully less. The Temps published its last Paris issue on Friday and has transferred its headquarters to Bordeaux. M. Georges Clemençeau's Homme Libre has ceased to appear. So also have the Gil Blas and Autorité. The Daily Mail has migrated to Bordeaux. Most of the newspapers that remain are published on a single sheet. The veteran Journal des Débats announces that for one hundred and twenty-five years it has appeared in Paris, being interrupted only at rare and brief intervals when provisional governments, resulting from violence, by brute force prevented publication. Le Journal des Débats will continue to be printed and published in Paris "so long as it is materially possible to do so." M. Arthur Meyer, editor and proprietor of Le Gaulois, announces that he will "remain in Paris in 1914 as he did in 1870." He will continue to edit and publish the Gaulois in Paris, having around him "a small family of editors and reporters, who replace my own family, now, Alas! far away!" The Echo de Paris continues to publish each day an edition of four pages. So also does Le Figaro. The Matin and Liberté appear on single sheets.
[Photograph: Photo. by Paul Thompson. Workmen erecting a barricade in
Paris.]
The European edition of the New York Herald appears every day on its nice white glazed papier de luxe, in a four-page edition Sundays, and on a single sheet on week days. The Paris Herald, as it is familiarly called, is printed half in English and half in French. The war has not frightened away the venerable "Old Philadelphia Lady," who daily continues, as she has done since Christmas eve, 1899, to put the following question:
TO THE EDITOR OF THE HERALD:—
I am anxious to find out the way to figure the temperature from Centigrade to Fahrenheit and vice-versâ. In other words, I want to know, whenever I see the temperature designated on Centigrade thermometer, how to find out what it would be on Fahrenheit's thermometer.