Among the picture post-cards then on sale was one of Marianne, who is France, bound for the front in an aeroplane with a crowing French cock sitting on the brace above her. Marianne looked as happy as if she were going to the races; the cock as triumphant as if he had a spur through the German eagle's throat. However, there was little sale for picture post-cards or other trifles, while Paris waited for the siege. They did not help to win victories. News and not jeux d'esprit, victory and not wit, was wanted.
For Marianne went to war with her liberty cap drawn tight over her brow, a beat in her temples, and her heart in her throat; and the cock had his head down and pointed at the enemy. She was relieved in a way, as all Europe was, that the thing had come; at last an end of the straining of competitive taxation and preparation; at last the test. She had no Channel, as England had, between her and the foe. Defeat meant the heel of the enemy on her soil, German sentries in her streets, submission. Long and hard she had trained; while the outside world, thinking of the Paris of the boulevards, thought that she could not resist the Kaiser's legions. She was effeminate, effete. She was all right to run cafés and make artificial flowers, but she lacked beef. All the prestige was with her enemy. In '70 all the prestige had been with her. For there is no prestige like military prestige. It is all with those who won the last war.
"But if we must succumb, let it be now," said the French.
On, on—the German corps were coming like some machine- controlled avalanche of armed men. Every report brought them a little nearer Paris. Ah, monsieur, they had numbers, those Germans! Every German mother has many sons; a French mother only one or two.
How could one believe those official communiqués which kept saying that the position of the French armies was favourable and then admitted that von Kluck had advanced another twenty miles? The heart of Paris stopped beating. Paris held its breath. Perhaps the reason there was no panic was that Parisians had been prepared for the worst.
What silence! The old men and the women in the streets moved as under a spell, which was the sense of their own helplessness. But few people were abroad, and those going on errands apparently. The absence of traffic and pedestrians heightened the sepulchral appearance to superficial observation. At the windows of flats, inside the little shops, and on by-streets, you saw waiting faces, everyone with the weight of national grief become personal. Was Paris alive? Yes, if Paris is human and not bricks and stone. Every Parisian was living a century in a week. So, too, was one who loved France. In the prospect of its loss he realized the value of all that France stands for, her genius, her democracy, her spirit.
One recalled how German officers had said that the next war would be the end of France. An indemnity which would crush out her power of recovery would be imposed on her. Her northern ports would be taken. France, the most homogeneous of nations, would be divided into separate nationalities—even this the Germans had planned. Those who read their Shakespeare in the language they learned in childhood had no doubt of England's coming out of the war secure; but if we thought which foreign civilization brought us the most in our lives, it was that of France.
What would the world be without French civilization? To think of France dead was to think of cells in your own brain that had gone lifeless; of something irreparable extinguished to every man to whom civilization means more than material power of destruction. The sense of what might be lost was revealed to you at every turn in scenes once merely characteristic of a whole, each with an appeal of its own now; in the types of people who, by their conduct in this hour of trial, showed that Spartan hearts might beat in Paris-the Spartan hearts of the mass of everyday, workaday Parisians.
Those waiting at home calmly with their thoughts, in a France of apprehension, knew that their fate was out of their hands in the hands of their youth. The tide of battle wavering from Meaux to Verdun might engulf them; it might recede; but Paris would resist to the last. That was something. She would resist in a manner worthy of Paris; and one could live on very little food. Their fathers had. Every day that Paris held out would be a day lost to the Germans and a day gained for Joffre and Sir John French to bring up reserves.
The street lamps should not reveal to Zeppelins or Taubes the location of precious monuments. You might walk the length of the Champs Elysées without meeting a vehicle or more than two or three pedestrians. The avenue was all your own; you might appreciate it as an avenue for itself; and every building and even the skyline of the streets you might appreciate, free of any association except the thought of the results of man's planning and building. Silent, deserted Paris by moonlight, without street lamps—few had ever seen that. Millionaire tourists with retinues of servants following them in motor- cars may never know this effect; nor the Parisienne who paid a thousand francs to send her pet dog to Marseilles.