There was a small first class waiting room and I took refuge in it. An officer was asleep on a bench. Another was talking to his mother and there were two other women in the room. Presently there entered a drunken Algerian soldier. He was very drunk and he carried a gun almost as tall as himself. As he was out of place in a ladies’ waiting room two poilus entered and attempted to induce him to leave. He shouted defiance and, lifting his gun, flung it to the floor with a crash. It made such a noise that the soldiers without surged to the doorway. It is to our credit that not one of the women jumped. He repeated this performance four times, and we sat quite still and looked at him with curiosity.
If any one had told me a month earlier that I should sit unmoved while a drunken soldier flung a loaded gun on the floor in front of me—twice it pointed directly at me—I should have dismissed him as a contemptible flatterer. But there is something about this military area—well you simply experience no sensations at all. You are in the zone of death. Human life has no value whatever. You, too, suddenly become as callous as if inoculated.
He was led out, and I opened my book. But the room was very warm. I asked the doorkeeper to let me wait for the train on the platform beside the tracks. Of course he refused. Petty officials never deviate from their cast-iron rules. However, he was a réformé, with one arm, and I determined to take a base advantage of him. The next time he had occasion to open the door I was behind him, and I walked out and seated myself on a bench in the fresh air. “Now,” I said, “here I am, and here I shall stay. What are you going to do to me?” For a moment he scowled at me, then shrugged his shoulders and walked away. A few moments later the other women followed my example, and we sat and talked, occasionally glancing up through the shattered glass roof; particularly as the hour of 5 approached.
One of the women, who looked like a farmer’s wife, judging by her dress and the large basket she held on her lap, told me that she had come from the south of France to the Hôpital Central just too late to see her boy, who was dead of typhoid fever. Once or twice she looked as if she were going to cry, but did not. The mothers of France are stoics these days.
No taubes appeared, and I slept in Paris. The next day I took my wrath to the War Office. I now have a promise of a military automobile for a trip to Révigny, Nancy and Remiramont. No Rheims, no Verdun—unless we can cajole some General within the lines. It is astonishing the high value the French place upon the life of a mere woman. James M. Beck visited Amiens on his way from England to Paris, and within two days of his arrival went off on a tour of the immediate front. The day after his return, off he went again with Owen Johnson, to call on General Joffre. I reminded my friends in the War Office that men were as easily killed as women, even American men. But they seem to think that the explosion of an American woman, especially if she happened to be “of a prominence,” would make too much noise in the world to be agreeable. They have trouble enough on their hands.
THE WAR ZONE BY AUTOMOBILE
PARIS, August 18.
nce more I was summoned to the War Office, this time to be informed that although they wanted me to feel satisfied and really see something of the great drama, they would not take the responsibility of sending me so far into the military zone unless I obtained the personal escort of an American Army officer. And where, I demanded, was I to find an American Army officer in Paris? They suggested the American Clearing House.