CHAPTER XXXI
THE QUATORZE OF TESTING

BIG BERTHA, or rather her successors, kept up a sporadic bombardment of Paris in April and May. A few shells fell again in June. But the effect of the bombardment, materially and morally, was nothing like that of the original Big Bertha. The culmination of horror and indignation was reached on Good Friday afternoon, when a hundred people were killed in the church of Saint-Gervais. After that the Germans made no other big killing. They came to realize that Big Bertha could not intimidate or demoralize Paris. Where the shells fell, however, we shall never forget.

I used to listen with awe (and a bit of envy) to the stories of people who passed through the siege of 1870. I remember well when I was a child being told by my father's friends, as we drove in the city, "A shell burst here in 1870 and tore the front out of a shop: I was sitting at a café near by"; or, "On that spot the Versailles troops stormed a barricade and lined its defenders against a wall—there was no quarter." Now I have my stories to tell! There is hardly a street between the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Seine that is not associated in my mind with an aeroplane bomb or a Big Bertha shell. The compensation for having lived through these days will be the privilege of telling Americans who come to see us "all about it." As the years go by, I have no doubt that legends will form themselves in my mind and that I shall do my full share of innocent and unintentional lying. You want to impress your listener: so you must make things graphic.

But I shall never be eloquent enough to enhance upon or exaggerate the nervous tension through which we passed during the spring and early summer of 1918. From the moment we learned the news of the collapse of the Fifth British Army, which brought the Germans to Montdidier, until the tide of battle was definitely turned, we never had an easy moment. The strain was worse than in 1914. For it lasted months instead of weeks, and reverses after four years of fighting, with all the world against Germany, were more difficult to understand and to stand. The British were just recovering themselves when the Germans fell on the French, captured the entire Craonne plateau for which we had been struggling for three years, reoccupied Soissons, and started to advance once more from the Aisne to the Marne.

It was not easy to be an optimist. We had faith in the holding ability of the French and British armies; we believed that the Germans were shooting their last bolt; and we knew that the Americans were arriving in large numbers. But we had been fooled so often about internal conditions in Germany! And Russia and the submarine warfare were factors concerning which we had no exact data. The people who recreate the past with the advantage of hindsight will tell that they never worried a minute. They knew things were coming out all right! To listen to them one would think that they expected all along to happen just what did happen in the way it did happen. When I hear this kind of talk now I know that it was either a case of

"Where ignorance is bliss
’Tis folly to be wise,"

or hopeless bumptiousness. How strange it is that many of those who tell you now that the Germans never had a chance ran away from Paris in 1914 and again in 1918.

Parisians passed no fortnight in which there was more anxiety and uncertainty to their beloved city than the first two weeks of July. The Germans were widening their pocket. They occupied the right bank of the Marne from Château-Thierry to Dormans. They crossed the Marne. It was too late for Germany to hope to win the war. But would they get to Paris?

On July Fourth I was in reconquered Alsace and my husband was speaking at Tours. He telegraphed me to join him at Boulogne-Sur-Mer on July seventh. It took me three days to go in slow trains, with an occasional lift by motor, the entire length of the front. I saw everywhere reserves of troops and endless lines of motor-trucks and trains with cannon and ammunition. The American uniform was ubiquitous. All this gave me a hope and confidence I had not felt in Paris, where I knew that the Government was making more elaborate preparations than in 1914 to evacuate the city. Herbert and I returned to Paris from Etaples on July ninth. The direct route by Abbéville and Amiens was under the German cannon, so we had to make a wide detour by Tréport and Beauvais. We both had a raging fever and it was all we could do to get home from the Gare de Nord.

Doctor Charon came early in the morning and told us that we were down with the grippe espagnole, the plague that was sweeping France and that had much to do with the general depression. Many a soldier who had gone through four years of battle unscathed succumbed to this mysterious disease. It hit one suddenly and the end came quickly. On the other hand, if the first forty-eight hours passed without complications, recovery was as rapid. Despite the protests of Doctor Charon, Herbert got out of bed on the morning of the thirteenth to go to Lyons to the inauguration of the Pont Président-Wilson. I was up to celebrate the Quatorze. After it was over, I was glad of the illness that came to keep me in Paris for this day when we whistled to keep up our courage. Had the Spanish grip not interfered, I should have returned to my children in the Little Gray Home near Saint-Nazaire.