I put in an hour, dawdling about. I bought an evening paper. There was nothing startling in it unless it was M. de Schoen's last visit to the Quai d'Orsay, but not even the most inveterate optimists could any longer suggest that there was the faintest glimmer of hope. One article signed "A Military Attaché" interested me. It was a study on the probable forced attack, dear to the German heart, through Belgium, towards the source of the Oise. It explained how the enemy, if successful in getting so far, would be only ten days' march from Paris.
I walked on absent-mindedly, crumpling the paper in my hand. Ten days' march. It looked rather as if they were preparing the public for what was to come! We had so little protection, it was true, against the danger which threatened to swoop down upon us from the North. Was the City destined, a few weeks hence, to undergo the horrors and humiliation of a new siege? How quickly my mind was overwhelmed by baleful visions born of the Fatal Year.
I pulled myself up. Steady on! We were only just beginning.
Never mind! The resemblance between yesterday and to-day obtruded itself upon my mind. A comparison which ought to have been all in favour of the present. There had been no lack of speeches and articles extolling the revival of our energies for some years past. Was it real or imaginary? What an opportunity it was to audit that? Not in connection with myself. I deliberately set myself aside. But in the great bulk of people; it was on them that our fate hung.
Well, I was only partially reassured on this point.
I think I should have preferred to see a tide of humanity sweeping along the avenues as in July of the year '70; to a rasping accompaniment of "Berlin!! To Berlin!"
Cheek, of course, but heroic cheek, and proof of the warmness of their hearts.
While to-day! People were wandering about, plenty of them, it's true, standing in front of the posters, theatres, and picture palaces, thronging the open-air cafés, but you might have thought they had come out on this summer evening solely for the sake of enjoying a breath of the mild air. They talked quietly among themselves as they walked up and down, or read the papers with an air of distrustful wisdom, perfectly well aware that they were not being told everything. One might have imagined oneself back in the days of the floods of 1910, when the Parisian public would learn with apparent indifference that such and such a quarter of their city was threatened with extinction.
An irritating attitude in a crowd, at a time when—now or never—it should have been moved, uplifted, carried away by great inspirations. Who would believe that I asked myself in all seriousness if France must be despaired of, if our country had not come to such a pass that there was nothing to be done but to strike her off the map of Europe, the victim as Hellas was of yore, of her excess of philosophy...? This idea was distasteful to me.... But still! If there was nothing to be done but to resign ourselves! We should go and start life again elsewhere, in some free country like America.... Those who got out alive! I still hoped to be among them.
The thought also crossed my mind that we were taking part in a renewal of the hardy and unassuming, the gay and tranquil qualities, which were the attributes of our race.... We had not always been the most highly-strung people of the world; during the forty years of peace we had recaptured our gifts; peace-lovers by nature and only entering the lists under provocation, and in our own defence, perhaps we were to astonish the universe anew by our valiance.