We went to bed, and oh, how we slept! We have wanted to experience a real raid and now we have, and we’ve had one and that’s enough.
This morning the maids brought in wild tales with our breakfast. The École des Mines had been hit, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The morning papers said nothing. As the workers came strolling in to the Vestiaire, heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, but bursting with questions, we could get little definite news.
Mlle. Herzog and I started out hot-foot for the École des Mines, hoping that the work would not grudge us half an hour for satisfying our curiosity. We found a big crowd, managed by a policeman standing in front of the École, in which every window was broken. So was every window on both sides of the Boulevard for several hundred feet, and a big ragged hole beside the asphalt showed where the bomb had fallen. Things seem so different in the daytime—there were all the commonplace buildings, the tram, the policeman, the landmarks that we know so well, and yet the sidewalks were covered with broken glass and limbs of trees, and that big hole had been made by a real live Boche!
It seemed fairly near home too—the spot is about as far from us as three New York short blocks, perhaps a little farther; but it doesn’t seem so far away to drop a bomb when some one has come all the way from Germany.
During the day we heard of more places hit—a hospital near Place d’Italie; a house where one child was buried alive; a cabman was killed somewhere, but not his horse. The worst damage was on the Avenue de la Grande Armée, where a three-story house was ruined. We hope to go over to-morrow at lunch-time and see. Thank Heaven, they missed the Arc de Triomphe.
Doris Nevin, who had supper here with us to-night, went over to the Concorde at the end of the raid last night and saw the wreckage of a French machine which was burned up.
The papers have headlines and long blank columns, so that we know nothing. They acknowledge twenty victims, though. The Germans mans always attack two or three nights running, and the strain to-day has been the knowledge that they would come again to-night. But now one thing I know: that to-night Paris is deep in a fog that nothing can penetrate; that a mist which seems hardly more than air is protecting us as neither iron nor steel can do; and that no German can follow the shining rivers and lakes to attack us. Oh, to feel so safe! It makes me think of the Great Peace we shall have at the end of the war. If we can only all give our strength to have that come soon.
With much love,
Esther.
The Riverside Press