The Soul of the War

by Philip Gibbs

There was a blue sky over the city—so clear and cloudless that if any Zeppelin came before the night, it would have been seen a mile high, as a silver ship, translucent from stem to stern, sailing in an azure sea. One would not be scared by one of these death-ships on such a day as this, nor believe, until the crash came, that it would drop down destruction upon this dream city, all aglitter in gold and white, with all its towers and spires clean-cut against the sky.

It was hard to think of death and war; because spring had come with its promise of life. There was a thrill of new vitality throughout the city. I seemed to hear the sap rising in the trees along the boulevards. Or was it only the wind plucking at invisible harp-strings, or visible telephone wires, and playing the spring song in Parisian ears?

In the Tuileries gardens, glancing aslant the trees, I saw the first green of the year, as the buds were burgeoning and breaking into tiny leaves. The white statues of goddesses—a little crumbled and weather-stained after the winter—were bathed in a pale sunshine. Psyche stretched out her arms, still half-asleep, but waking at the call of spring. Pomona offered her fruit to a young student, who gazed at her with his black hat pushed to the back of his pale forehead.

Womanhood, with all her beauty carved in stone, in laughing and tragic moods, in the first grace of girlhood, and in full maturity, stood poised here in the gardens of the Tuileries, and seemed alive and vibrant with this new thrill of life which was pulsing in the moist earth and whispering through the trees, because spring had come to Paris.

There was no doubt about it. The flower girls who had been early to les Halles came up the rue Royale one morning with baskets full of violets, so that all the street was perfumed as though great ladies were passing and wafting scent in their wake. Even the old cocher who drove me down the rue Cambon had put on a new white hat. He had heard the glad tidings, this old wrinkled man, and he clacked his whip to let others know, and gave the glad-eye—a watery, wicked old eye—to half a dozen midinettes who came dancing along the rue St. Honoré. They knew without his white hat, and the clack of his whip. The ichor of the air had got into their blood. They laughed without the reason for a jest, and ran, in a skipping way, because there was the spring-song in their feet.

Along the Champs Elysées there was the pathway of the sun. Through the Arc de Triomphe there was a glamorous curtain of cloth of gold, and arrows of light struck and broke upon the golden figures of Alexander's Bridge. Looking back I saw the dome of the Invalides suspended in space, like a cloud in the sky. It was painted over to baffle the way of hostile aircraft, but the paint was wearing off, and the gold showed through again, glinting and flashing in the air-waves.

The Seine was like molten liquid and the bridges which span it a dozen times or more between Notre Dame and the Pont de l'Aima were as white as snow, and unsubstantial as though they bridged the gulfs of dreams. Even the great blocks of stone and the balks of timber which lie on the mud banks below the Quai d'Orsay—it is where the bodies of suicides float up and bring new tenants to the Morgue— were touched with the beauty of this lady day, and invited an artist's brush.

The Eiffel Tower hung a cobweb in the sky. Its wires had been thrilling to the secrets of war, and this signal station was barricaded so that no citizens might go near, or pass the sentries pacing there with loaded rifles. But now it was receiving other messages, not of war. The wireless operator with the receiver at his ears must have heard those whispers coming from the earth: "I am spring… The earth is waking… I am coming with the beauty of life… I am gladness and youth…"

Perhaps even the sentry pacing up and down the wooden barricade heard the approach of some unseen presence when he stood still that morning and peered through the morning sunlight. "Halt! who goes there?" "A friend." "Pass, friend, and give the countersign."

The countersign was "Spring," and where the spirit of it stepped, golden crocuses had thrust up through the warming earth, not far from where, a night or two before, fire-balls dropped from a hostile air- craft.