They laughed scornfully at the solemn lies published in the German papers regarding the alleged panic their bombardment was creating. I have seen men and women sitting outside the cafés in the Rue Royale and on the boulevards, sipping their apéritifs before dinner and enjoying these exaggerations, as reprinted in the Paris papers.
They smiled and chuckled over the news announced in the Stuttgart Neues Tageblatt that Paris would soon be a mass of ruins; that even the working class population no longer had the hardihood to remain. The roads leading to Tours, Orleans, Lyons, cities of the south, were crowded with interminable convoys, vehicles drawn by horses, donkeys and even dogs. Sick women were being transported in baby carriages. The forest of Fontainbleau was one vast camp of refugees.
“Listen then to this, mon vieux,” reads a highly diverted Frenchman to his neighbor at the next table. “It is not only from fear of the Germans that the entire population is in flight, but it is from fear of the French themselves. The capital is filled with deserting soldiers and other disaffected persons who wait only a favorable opportunity to overthrow the government. Do you hear? The Berliner Tageblatt says so.”
Funniest of all to the Parisians were the tales of how the whole of Paris not fleeing to the south was living day and night underground, and how not only people but all public monuments were being sent to the caves.
A cartoon in Le Matin, I think it was, represented a Frenchman remarking to a friend that the fog was so thick yesterday that he couldn’t see the Eiffel Tower. “Oh, haven’t you heard?” exclaims the other, “Clemenceau has hidden it in the Metro.”
I write this also to give the American people an idea of the fantastic “news” with which the Germans feed their people and keep alive in them the hope that they can ultimately win this war. Some of these German dispatches appear in our own newspapers, exaggerated accounts of victories, absurd estimates of damage inflicted by bombardments. We should laugh at them as the French do.
The Germans tell their hungry populations that terror is winning the war, that the French civil population is in flight and that the government is tottering. It is ridiculously untrue. Many people have left Paris, just as our people would seek refuge from a like situation.
All the people who have summer homes have gone to them earlier than usual. There is a systematic movement to take as many children as possible outside the danger zone. Delicate women and invalids have generally gone. That is all.
CHAPTER XX
BLED WHITE
Mr. Hoover tells us that we must save more food. Especially more wheat. With all the sacrifices we have voluntarily made, with all the ingenuity women have used to save food and still keep their families well nourished, the women are called upon to do more. As far as wheat and a few other staples are concerned, Mr. Hoover tells us that our shipments abroad are only now beginning to approach the “minimum requirements” of our soldiers and of our allies.