Half way down the Champs-Elysées, at the Rond-Point, were heaps of captured cannon that had stood along the Avenue and in the Place de la Concorde through the winter since the armistice. They had been gathered here, and surmounting them was the coq gaulois. But around the Rond-Point huge urns commemorated the most costly battles of the war, and in them incense was burning.
"Are you going to see the parade?" I asked a friend who had lost two brothers.
"Certainly," she replied. "Last week my mother went to the grave of my little brother in the Argonne. She put wreaths on it and prayed there. The other brother was blown up by a shell. There is no grave for him. So to-night we shall think of him when we pray before the cenotaph. We shall spend the night there to have a good place to-morrow."
Herbert and I thought of her and her mother and of many other friends who were in the crowd around the Arc de Triomphe. We had our own reasons for bowing before the cenotaph. Dear friends had been lost during those awful years and in the last weeks one of our own family fell on the front between the Le Cateau and Guise. It is strange how you go on living in the midst of war, seeing others suffer, sharing their grief, and never thinking that the death that is stalking about will enter your own family circle until the telegram comes. You have helped others at that moment: and then it is you.
There is a fine sense of balance in French character. One remembers the dead, but one does not forget the living. Most of those who intended to go with hearts rejoicing and smiles and laughter to greet the défilé of the Quatorze could not have stood the ordeal unless it had been preceded by the quiet night watch with the dead.
The Quatorze has always meant to us an early start for the Bois du Bologne to see the review. Throughout the Third Republic the day had a distinctly military atmosphere. Who does not remember Longchamp before the war? Each year Paris went to the review with pride not unmixed with anxiety. There was a serious aspect impossible for the stranger to realize and appreciate. After all, the army was not a small body of men who had given themselves to a military career. It was the youth of the nation performing a duty imposed upon it by the geographical position of France. The army was the nation in arms, an institution as necessary for well-being and security as the police. Longchamp on the Quatorze was the assurance that the job of protecting France was being well looked after. And the spectators were the fathers and mothers, the brothers and sisters, of the army. Every Parisian had passed through the mill. How often after the review, when the soldiers came from the field, have I seen middle-aged civilians joking with them in the way one only does with comrades of one's own fraternity. It was hard for the Anglo-Saxon to understand this before the war. The Barrack-room Ballads would be incomprehensible to a Frenchman. "Tommy" was everybody in France.
But this review was different. The intimacy, the sense of the soldiers belonging to the people and being of the people, had always been there. Added to it now was the knowledge of what the army had done for France. There is no country where la patrie reconnaissante means more than in France. And the great danger was so fresh in our minds! From the standpoint of the soldier it was different, too. For five weary years the poilu constantly on duty and not knowing which day might be the last saw in the soft blue rings of his cigarette smoke the défilé under the Arc de Triomphe and prayed that he and his comrades would be there. That was the only uncertainty—whether he himself would be spared for the jour de la victoire. If France's soldiers had doubted that the day would arrive, they could not have continued to sing the Marseillaise—and the war would have been lost then and there. The Quatorze of peace days was fun to the spectators but a corvée for the soldiers who marched. The Quatorze of victory was the realization of the dream that sustained the soldiers throughout the war. It was the reward for having believed what they muttered doggedly through their teeth, "Nous allons les écraser comme des pommes de terre cuites!"
One of our poilus, a boy to whom we had been through the war as next of kin, who wore the médaille militaire and whose croix de guerre carried several palms, came to us late in the night before the victory parade. He said with tears in his eyes,
"The chains are down!"
"What chains?" I asked.