You wend your way up creaky old stairs to No. 13, or is it 31, and, luxury of luxuries, you find a tub of hot water—or it was hot at the hour for which you ordered it—awaiting you. Divesting yourself of your clothes you double your body this way and that in a vain endeavor to dip more than half of yourself at once.
At last you feel clean, and you struggle into pyjamas, and crawl into bed between real, white, clean linen sheets for the first time in six months, and you sleep as no emperor can sleep on the most silken of divans, while you dream of the morrow when you really begin your leave.
Leave! Ah, we were speaking of leave! Well, let us, you and I, take it together. Let us enjoy to the full the flesh-pots of London. For our leave lasts only ten days, and the war must go on till we have shown the Hun that he cannot autocratically put his Prussian militaristic crown of thorns on the fair brow of Civilization.
CHAPTER XX
PARIS DURING THE WAR
Paris, that queen of cities, has been an interesting study to all who have paid her a visit at any time, but particularly interesting is that study since the war began.
Previous to the war I had the good fortune to visit this city on a number of occasions, my last visit having been but a few months before the beginning of this great militaristic conflagration which is still sweeping over the civilized world. At that time I had just returned from a "grand tour," taking in Italy, Austria, and Southern Germany, where no signs were discernible on the horizon of the stupendous attempt at world domination which the Prussian junkers were to engineer within four months' time. Paris at that time was enjoying bright and balmy spring weather; the boulevards were crowded with visiting tourists, the Champs-Elysées with gay and merry crowds, and the Bois de Boulogne with riders and motorists in its wooded avenues, and rowers and paddlers on its lakes. It remained in my memory a picture of beauty, peace, gayety, and prosperity.
My return to it came within the year, at the beginning of 1915, when the war cloud that hung over the whole of Europe particularly dimmed the sun of Paris. I came into it in the afternoon from the north, and my first view of it showed that beautiful edifice, the Church of the Sacre Coeur, on the hill of Montmartre standing out en silhouette, "just as if cut from paper," as a traveling companion remarked.
Since the war began, on one's arrival at his hotel in Paris he has to give many particulars of himself not required in peace times. The following morning he must call at the nearest police station and obtain, after many more questions as to nationality, occupation, and reasons for being there, a permis de séjour—permit to remain—good for a certain length of time, at the expiration of which the permit must be renewed.
On stepping out of my hotel the following morning to go to the police station, the first thing that struck my attention was the large number of women in mourning, though it was then only a matter of months since the beginning of hostilities. The thought that flitted sadly through my mind was that one-half of the women of Paris are in mourning now, and ere long the other half will be. It must not be forgotten that the French wear mourning for relations much more distant than those for whom we wear it; but even at that the war must not have gone on many months before a very large percentage of the French homes had been touched by the deaths of those near and dear to them. For the soil of France was under the heel of the foreign invader, and there are no people in the world who love their mother country with a deeper devotion than the French. A very old woman, living away up in the north of France in a town that was shelled by the Germans almost daily showed me her love for la belle France and her hatred of its enemies in one expressive sentence. I had asked her if she did not tire of the continuous pounding of the guns.