There was a little pause, and a rustling of bodies.
Then the man, who was on his feet, spoke up. “I'll stay as long as any one else does,” he said. “Anyhow, I don't know which is likely to be the worse of two evils—my poor attempts at entertaining you inside or the boche's threatened performances outside.”
A great yell of approval went up and not a single person left the building until after the chairman announced that the programme for the evening had reached its conclusion. I know this to be a fact because I was among those present.
To be sure, the strain of the harassment got upon the nerves of some; that would be inevitable, human nature being what it is. Attendance at the theatres, especially for the matinées, fell off appreciably; this, though, being attributable, I think, more to fear of panic inside the buildings than to fear of what the missiles might do to the buildings themselves. And there was no record of any individual, whether man or woman, quitting a post of responsibility because of the personal peril to which all alike were exposed.
Likewise on those days when the great gun functioned promptly at twenty-minute intervals one would see men sitting in drinking places with their eyes glued to the faces of their wrist watches while they waited for the next crash. For those whose nerves lay close to their skins this damnable regularity of it was the worst phase of the thing.
There was something so characteristically and atrociously German, something so hellishly methodical in the tormenting certainty that each hour would be divided into three equal parts by three descending steel tubes of potential destruction.
Big Bertha operated on a perfect schedule. She opened up daily at seven a. m. sharp; she quit at six-twenty p. m. It was as though the crew that tended her carried union cards. They were never tardy. Neither did they work overtime. But if the Prussians counted upon bedeviling the people into panic and distracting the industrial and social economies of Paris they missed their guess. They made some people desperately unhappy, no doubt, and they frightened some; but the true organism of the community remained serene and unimpaired.
Some share of this, I figure might be attributed to the facts that in a city as great as Paris the chances of any one individual being killed were so greatly reduced that the very size of the town served to envelop its inhabitants with a sense of comparative immunity; the number of buildings, and their massiveness inspired a feeling of partial security. I know I felt safer than I have felt out in the open when the enemy's playful batteries were searching out the terrain round about. In a smaller city this condition probably would not have been manifest to the same degree. There almost everybody would be likely to know personally the latest victim or to be familiar with the latest scene of damage and this would serve doubtlessly to bring the apprehensive home to all households. Howsoever, be the underlying cause what it might, Paris weathered the brunt of the ordeal with splendid fortitude and an admirable coolness.
Being frequently in Paris between visits to one or another sector of the front, I was able to keep a fairly accurate score in the ravages of the bombardment and to get a fairly average appraisal of the effects upon the Parisian temper. Likewise by reading translated extracts out of German newspapers I got impressions of another phase of the tragedy which almost was as vivid as though I had been an eye witness to events which I knew of only at second-hand from the published descriptions of them.
I had the small advantage though on my side of being able to vizualise the setting in the Forest of St. Gobain, to the west of Laon for I was there once in German company. I could conjure up a presentiment of the scene there enacted on the day when Big Bertha's makers and masters sprang their well-guarded surprise, which so carefully and so secretly had been evolved during months of planning and constructing and experimentations. Behold then the vision: It is a fine spring morning. There is dew on the grass and there is song in the throats of the birds and young foliage is upon the trees. The great grey gun—it is nearly ninety feet long and according to inspired Teutonic chronicles resembles a vast metal crone—squats its misshapen mass upon a prepared concrete base in the edge of the woods, just on the timbered shoulder of a hill. Its long muzzle protrudes at an angle from the interlacing boughs of the thicket where it hides; at a very steep angle, too, since the charge it will fire must ascend twenty miles into the air in order to reach its objective. Behind it is a stenciling of white birdies and slender poplars flung up against the sky line; in front of it is a disused meadow where the newly minted coinage of a prodigal springtime—dandelions that are like gold coins and wild marguerites that are like silver ones—spangle the grass as though the profligate season had strewn its treasures broadcast there. The gunners make ready the monster for its dedication. They open its great navel and slide into its belly a steel shell nine inches thick and three feet long nearly and girthed with beltings of spun brass. The supreme moment is at hand.