Saturday, August 22d. German affairs are now reduced to a system. The Embassy each day opens to Americans at ten o’clock. I begin with my Germans and Austrians at nine in order to get clear of the least desirable element before the Americans appear. In that first hour we dispose of about fifty per cent.; the half that need only routine assistance. At present I receive them in the entrance hall of the Embassy at the far end. I sit at the desk facing the door and have the money sent by the German Government for destitute cases on my left hand in a drawer against the wall. An Austrian, long resident in Paris, and president of the Austro-Hungarian Relief Society, is placed on my right to give me the benefit of his long experience in charity work. He already knows many of those who apply for aid and can judge whether or not they are really destitute. Beyond him is another assistant who fills out receipts for each sum distributed and obtains the signature of the recipient. Special appointments for the afternoon hours are made with those applicants who want information or help which cannot immediately be decided upon.
The crowd outside the door, often several hundred in number, is kept in order by two policemen. Assistants hand out numbers like those used for the Paris auto-busses, not given however for priority, but for undesirability; the least desirable getting in first so that we may be the sooner rid of them. These assistants also see that each applicant has the correct papers in his hand, and that three of them are waiting in line to facilitate the steady flow of the human current. The receipts and my entries form a double record and check to be used in the official accounts which are balanced every day and in the end will be transmitted in reports to the German and Austrian Governments. A stenographer keeps an indexed, alphabetical list of all the applicants, which enables me to find the past record of any case which reappears. In addition to this, I have a system of hieroglyphics which I write in on the lower right-hand corner of the police papers which every foreigner must at all times carry with him for identification. There is also an interpreter for those rare comers who speak neither French nor English. By this system I have managed to examine as many as one hundred and thirty-five cases in an hour, and once as high a number as seven hundred in a single day.
At the beginning of the war there were probably at least thirty thousand Germans and Austrians in or near Paris who became wards of the American Embassy when the affairs of the German and Austrian Embassies were turned over to us, all of them needing to be furnished with proper police papers and to be provided with a refuge until such time as they are shipped to detention camps in the south of France.
Sunday, August 23d. Here in Paris, extraordinary as it may seem, we have had no real news of the progress of the war. The Official Communiqués carry to a fine point the art of saying nothing of any importance. The newspapers are so strictly censored that they are permitted to publish little except these communiqués or editorials based upon them. Letters and papers from America really give us the first accounts of events which are happening at our very gates. We know by rumor that there has been heavy fighting somewhere and somewhen. Many German prisoners are being taken around Paris southward to the detention camps which I hope soon to visit, and the flags of three German regiments have been brought to Paris and exhibited with considerable ceremony. This should indicate that battles favorable to the French have been fought, since a German regiment numbers three thousand men and would defend its flag to the last.
Of late one sees everywhere numbers of women in mourning, increasing so rapidly as to attract the attention of even the least observing. Paris still maintains a strange calm. The stillness of the city is positively oppressive. Even the newsboys drag slowly along calling in a disheartened voice their wares which no longer contain any news and which, in consequence, find few buyers.
The people seem to realize from the very lack of news that this is to be a long and terrible war and that any decisive result cannot be at present expected.
Letters are constantly arriving at the Embassy, forwarded to us with great care by French soldiers who have found them on the bodies of dead Germans, or received them from the hands of the dying. They are sent to us in the hope that we may eventually find means to transmit them to Germany to the relatives of the dead for whom they were intended. Today came such a note written by a German airman who had been shot down out of the sky. He had evidently realized that his time was short and had hurriedly scribbled on the back of a sheet of instructions printed in German script the few words he could summon strength to write. The scrap of paper was torn and smudgy and a thumb-print in blood was impressed on one corner. Each word was more shaky and labored than the preceding one, as if each had been traced only by a supreme effort. On it was written in German, “Good-bye, Mother and Father. My leg is crushed. The French are very kind and....” A foot-note had been added by some French soldier explaining that the man had died while he was writing, and giving the means of identification which had been found on the body.
Monday, August 24th. Yesterday and this morning I have observed a very singular psychological phenomenon. Neither yesterday nor today have the authorities given out any military news of importance and the papers have been as non-committal as usual, yet all Paris believes that the Allies have suffered a great and terrible defeat at a place in Belgium called Charleroi. The whole city is as if it were under a pall. Every face wears a fatalistic expression terrible to behold. I have read of such mysterious spreading of evil tidings, but have never before witnessed anything of the kind. It is a very curious manifestation, whether or not it proves to have any foundation in fact.[1]