After the serenade and General Pershing's little speech of thanks the band, with most of the crowd following, marched over to des Invalides, the appointed place for the formal ceremony.
Around the ancient hotel, overflowing into the broad boulevards that radiate from it, and packing to suffocation the Champs de Mars in front of it, there were just as many Frenchmen as could stand shoulder to shoulder and chin to back. Inside, where there were speeches and exchanges of national emblems, the crowd was equally dense, in spite of the fact that only the very important or the very cunning had cards of admission.
The real Fourth celebration was in the streets. The waiting crowds yelled thunderously when the first band appeared, heralding the parade. Then came the Territorials, the escort troops, in their familiar horizon-blue. Then more bands, then officers, mounted and in motor-cars, and, finally, the Americans, manifestly having the proudest moment of their lives.
They were to march from des Invalides to Picpus Cemetery, the little private cemetery outside of Paris, where the Marquis de Lafayette is buried.
They crossed Solferino bridge, and made their way through a terrific crowd in the broad Place de la Concorde. The Paris newspapers, boasting of their conservatism, said there were easily one million Parisians that day within sight of des Invalides when the American soldiers left the building and started on their march.
To hear the soldiers tell it, there were easily one million Parisians, all under the age of ten, immediately under their feet before they had marched a mile.
From a balcony of the Hotel Crillon, on the north side of the Place de la Concorde, the marching Americans were wholly lost to view from the waist down. Nobody could ever complain of the French birth-rate after seeing that parade. Nobody ever saw that many children before in any one assemblage in France. It was prodigious.
And the French youngsters had their own notions of how they were to take part in that French Fourth of July. The main notion was to walk between the soldiers' legs. They were massed thick beside the soldiers, thick between them, impeding their knee action, terrorizing their steps. At a little distance, they looked like batter in a waffle-pan. But they did what they could to make the American soldiers feel among friends that day, and nobody could say they failed.
The parade turned along the picturesque old Rue de Rivoli on leaving the Place de la Concorde, and filed along the river, almost the length of the city. They had not gone far before the Frenchwomen had thrown them enough roses to decorate bayonets and hats and a few lapels. They made a brave sight, brave to nobility. And though they were harassed by the eager children, abashed by the women, and touched to genuine emotion by the whole city, they wouldn't have grudged five years of their lives for the privilege of being there.
At Picpus, the scene made up in intensiveness what it lacked in breadth, for the cemetery is far too small to permit of a crowd of size. A home for aged gentlewomen overlooks one wall ... its windows were filled, and their occupants proved that Frenchwomen are never too old or too gentle to throw roses. A military hospital overlooks another side, and balconies and windows were crowded with "blessés." The few officers and civilians who had access to the cemetery-grounds made their commemoration brief and simple. It was there that Colonel Stanton made the little speech which buzzed around the Allied world within the day: "Lafayette, nous voilà!"—"Lafayette, we're here!" Its felicity of phrase moved the French scribes to columns of congratulation. Its compactness won the Americans. Everybody said it was the best war speech made in France, and it was.