Nor is Paris itself without its refugees. The German advance, the air-raids, the shelling, culminating in the Good Friday horror, have combined to render the city half deserted.
“Paris? We call Paris ‘the front’ now-a-days,” one Frenchman on the journey had remarked to me.
Yesterday I went shopping. Everywhere it was the same reply. Nothing could be made to order for an indefinite period, the workrooms were all deserted, the workers fled. As for those who remain, they seem to take life calmly enough; what else can they do? When, as yesterday, every sixteen minutes a tremendous jarring crash tells you that a shell has fallen somewhere in the city,—and the concussion is so great that it always sounds as if it had fallen in the next block!—you see people turn their heads as they walk, staring in the direction of the explosion; others come out on the balconies to see what they can see and that is all.
Of course the danger of all this lies in its effect on the civilian morale. In connection with this I learned an interesting thing today. While the hospitals outside are overcrowded, the hospitals in Paris with their splendid equipment and staffs are left half empty, because they dare not show the people of Paris too many wounded. And when convoys are brought into the city, they are often detained outside, sometimes for hours, in order that the wounded may be transferred to the hospitals at night.
Yesterday at Brentano’s I got talking with a boy who belonged to the American Ambulance Section which is attached to the French. He told me an incident which struck my fancy:
One night, at the front, after a hard day’s work, he had just dropped off to sleep when he was awakened. There was a blessé to be taken back to the hospital, he was in bad shape, they had placed him in an ambulance. The boy rolled out of his blankets, started up the car. It was a bitter night. Once he was on his way everything went wrong; the water had frozen in the radiator, he had to get out and crawl along the ditches on his hands and knees, trying, in the dark to find a pool that was still unfrozen. And all the while he was tortured by the thought that the life of the wounded man in the car depended probably on his speed in reaching the hospital, and this urged him to an agony of haste. Finally, as the dawn was breaking, he reached his goal. They came to carry the blesse in. The wounded man was dead; he had been dead, it was evident, some while before the boy started. At the front, he explained, they hate to take the time and trouble to bury bodies. So whenever it is possible they work this method of passing on the task to someone else. You have to be constantly on the look-out for such tricks. This time they had fooled him.
Last night there was an air-raid. It was a mild affair. I was awakened by the sirens. They make what is to me quite the most fascinatingly horrible sound I have ever heard. That long agonized wail, now sinking to a shuddering whimper, now rising to a banshee screech, flashes vividly to my mind’s eye a myriad little demons sitting on the roofs of Paris, cowering, shivering, crying out their abject terror. I went to the window and looked out, but although my room is on the top floor of the hotel, I could see nothing and so went back to bed again. The anti-aircraft guns put up a tremendous barrage; they have them mounted on trucks now so they can quickly be shifted from point to point about the city. I am sure there was a whole battery just in front of the hotel. Today the papers inform us that the Gothas were driven back after reaching the suburbs.
This morning I went to service at Notre Dame, entering through piles of sand bags heaped so as to hide the carvings about the doorways. In that vast cathedral only a few were present, a fair share of the congregation being comprised of Americans.
Tonight an ambulance driver attached to one of the Paris hospitals came to the hotel for dinner. He spread a startling tale. Every ambulance in the city has been ordered to be in readiness; for tomorrow, it has been learned, twenty-seven long-range guns are to be turned at once on Paris!
Aix-les-Bains, April 6.