Presently it dawned upon the hearkening groups that the missiles were falling at stated and ordained periods. Twenty minutes regularly intervened between smashes. Appreciation of this circumstance injected a new element of surmise into a terrific and most profoundly puzzling affair. This was a mystery that grew momentarily more mysterious.
Business for the time being was pretty much suspended; anyhow nearly everybody appeared to be taking part in the debates. However, the taxicabs were still plying. A Parisian cabby may be trusted to take a chance on his life if there is a fare in sight and the prospect of a pourboire to follow. Two of us engaged a weather-beaten individual who apparently had no interest in the controversies raging about him or in the shelling either; and in his rig we drove to the scene of the first explosion, arriving there within a few minutes after the devilish cylinder fell.
There had been loss of life here—no great amount as loss of life is measured these times in this country, but attended by conditions that made the disaster hideous and distressing. The blood of victims still trickled in runlets between the paving stones where we walked, and there were mangled bodies stretched on the floor of an improvised morgue across the way—mainly bodies of poor working women, and one, I heard, the body of a widow with half a dozen children, who now would be doubly orphaned, since their father was dead at the Front.
Back again at my hotel after a forenoon packed with curious experiences, I found in my quarters a very badly scared chambermaid, trying to tidy a room with fingers that shook. In my best French, which I may state is the worst possible French, I was trying to explain to her that the bombardment had probably ended—and for a fact there had been a forty-minute lull in the new frightfulness—when one of the shells struck and went off among the trees and flowerbeds of a public breathing place not a hundred and fifty yards away. With a shriek the maid fell on her knees and buried her head, ostrich fashion, in a nest of sofa pillows.
I stepped through my bedroom window upon a little balcony in time to see the dust cloud rise in a column and to follow with my eyes the frenzied whirlings of a great flock of wood pigeons flighting high into the air from their roosting perches in the park plot. The next instant I felt a violent tugging at the back breadth of the leather harness that I wore. Unwittingly, in her panic the maid had struck upon the only possible use to which a Sam Browne belt may be put—other than the ornamental, and that is a moot point among fanciers of the purely decorative in the matter of military gearing for the human form. By accident she had divined its one utilitarian purpose. She had risen and with both hands had laid hold upon the crosspiece of my main surcingle and was striving to drag me inside. I rather gathered from the tenor of her contemporaneous remarks, which she uttered at the top of her voice and into which she interjected the names of several saints, that she feared the sight of me in plain view on that stone ledge might incite the invisible marauder to added excesses.
But I was the larger and stronger of the two, and my buckles held, and I had the advantage of an iron railing to cling to. After a short struggle my would-be rescuer lost. She turned loose of my kicking straps and breech bands, and making hurried reference to various names in the calendar of the canonised she fled from my presence. I heard her falling down the stairs to the floor below. The next day I had a new chambermaid; this one had tendered her resignation.
Not until the middle of the afternoon was the proper explanation for the phenomenon forthcoming. It came then from the Ministry of War, in the bald and unembroidered laconics of a formal communiqué. At the first time of hearing it the announcement seemed so inconceivable, so manifestly impossible that official sanction was needed to make men believe Teuton ingenuity had found a way to upset all the previously accepted principles touching on gravity and friction; on arcs and orbits; on aims and directions; on projectiles and projectives; on the resisting tensility of steel bores and on the carrying power of gun charges—by producing a cannon with a ranging scope of somewhere between sixty and ninety miles.
Days of bombardment followed—days which culminated on that never-to-be-forgotten Good Friday when malignant chance sped a shell to wreck one of the oldest churches in Paris and to kill seventy-five and wound ninety worshippers gathered beneath its roof.
After the first flurry of uncertainty the populace for the most part grew tranquil; now that they knew the origin of the far-flung punishment there was measurably less dread of the consequences among the masses of the people. On days when the shells exploded futilely the daily press and the comedians in the music halls made jokes at the expense of Big Bertha; as, for example, on a day when a fragment of shell took the razor out of the hand of a man who was shaving himself, without doing him the slightest injury; and again when a whole shell wrecked a butcher shop and strewed the neighbourhood with kidneys and livers and rib ends of beef, but spared the butcher and his family. On days when the colossal piece scored a murderous coup for its masters and took innocent life, the papers printed the true death lists without attempt at concealment of the ravages of the monster. And on all the bombardment days, women went shopping in the Rue de la Paix; children played in the parks; the flower women of the Madeleine sold their wares to customers with the reverberations of the explosions booming in their ears; the crowds that sat sipping coloured drinks at small tables in front of the boulevard cafés on fair afternoons were almost as numerous as they had been before the persistent thing started; and unless the sound was very loud indeed the average promenader barely lifted his or her head at each recurring report. In America we look upon the French as an excitable race, but here they offered to the world a pattern for the practice of fortitude.
A good many people departed from Paris to the southward. However, there was calmness under constant danger. Our own people, who were in Paris in numbers mounting up into the thousands, likewise set a fine example of sang-froid. On the evening of the opening day of the bombarding, when any one might have been pardoned for being a bit jumpy, an audience of enlisted men which packed the American Soldiers and Sailors' Club in the Rue Royale was gathered to hear a jazz band play Yankee tunes and afterward to hear an amateur speaker make an address. The cannon had suspended its annoying performances with the going down of the sun, but just as the speaker stood up by the piano the alerte for an air attack—which, by the way, proved to be a false alarm, after all—was heard outside.