Yesterday we were at peace. To-day we are at war. Something has entered into every heart and into every home; a million tiny fingers are busy snapping a million bonds of union. Blow trumpets and beat drums how you please, you cannot chase away the silence which has entered into the hearts of men, or the foreboding that tells us the great curse has come again.
"It is not even that we must go," said Franzius, "but that we must go at once. We are not going; we are driven forth. My friend, we will meet again, when it is over."
"When it is over," I said mechanically.
They had received their passports, and they told me of their plans. Franzius was beyond the age of military service. They would go to Frankfort, where he had some relations. He had plenty of money with which to live quietly till "it was over" and the world could hear music again.
I ordered a carriage to the door, and accompanied them to the station, through streets packed and crowded as if by some fête.
The station was thronged, and the train for the frontier was on the point of starting when we arrived. I have never seen such a crowd before. Families and their belongings, small tradesmen, Germans who had been prospering yesterday and who to-day, ruined and hopeless, were being driven forth back to their own country to starve. The buffet had been stripped of food; and when I thought of the long journey before my friends and the chances of the road, my heart misgave me, till Eloise showed me a basket that had been packed for them by Madame Ancelot.
Just as the train was starting, I jostled against a vendor of oranges who still had a few unsold. I bought them and gave them to Eloise.
I could not help remembering the day we had gone down first to Evry, she and I, and the oranges I had bought for her in the Boulevard St. Michel. That day, in spring!
"Good-bye! Good-bye!"
Eloise had squeezed herself through the window beside Franzius; the train moved away; the people who were leaving said a last good-bye to the people they had left, to friends who had cared for them till war came as a separation, to brother Germans who were bound to depart by the next train. I never heard so mournful a sound as that when the great train drew away for its journey into for ever, leaving me alone on the platform.