With the Allies

by Richard Harding Davis

You could tell when an officer passed by the electric torch he carried strapped to his chest. In the darkness the gray uniforms filled the station with an army of ghosts. You distinguished men only when pipes hanging from their teeth glowed red or their bayonets flashed.

Outside the station in the public square the people of Louvain passed in an unending procession, women bareheaded, weeping, men carrying the children asleep on their shoulders, all hemmed in by the shadowy army of gray wolves. Once they were halted, and among them were marched a line of men. These were on their way to be shot. And, better to point the moral, an officer halted both processions and, climbing to a cart, explained why the men were to die. He warned others not to bring down upon themselves a like vengeance.

As those being led to spend the night in the fields looked across to those marked for death they saw old friends, neighbors of long standing, men of their own household. The officer bellowing at them from the cart was illuminated by the headlights of an automobile. He looked like an actor held in a spotlight on a darkened stage.

It was all like a scene upon the stage, unreal, inhuman. You felt it could not be true. You felt that the curtain of fire, purring and crackling and sending up hot sparks to meet the kind, calm stars, was only a painted backdrop; that the reports of rifles from the dark ruins came from blank cartridges, and that these trembling shopkeepers and peasants ringed in bayonets would not in a few minutes really die, but that they themselves and their homes would be restored to their wives and children.

You felt it was only a nightmare, cruel and uncivilized. And then you remembered that the German Emperor has told us what it is. It is his Holy War.

Chapter IV Paris In War Time

Those who, when the Germans approached, fled from Paris, described it as a city doomed, as a waste place, desolate as a graveyard. Those who run away always are alarmists. They are on the defensive. They must explain why they ran away.

Early in September Paris was like a summer hotel out of season. The owners had temporarily closed it; the windows were barred, the furniture and paintings draped in linen, a caretaker and a night- watchman were in possession.

It is an old saying that all good Americans go to Paris when they die. Most of them take no chances and prefer to visit it while they are alive. Before this war, if the visitor was disappointed, it was the fault of the visitor, not of Paris. She was all things to all men. To some she offered triumphal arches, statues, paintings; to others by day racing, and by night Maxims and the Rat Mort. Some loved her for the book- stalls along the Seine and ateliers of the Latin Quarter; some for her parks, forests, gardens, and boulevards; some because of the Luxembourg; some only as a place where everybody was smiling, happy, and polite, where they were never bored, where they were always young, where the lights never went out and there was no early call. Should they to-day revisit her they would find her grown grave and decorous, and going to bed at sundown, but still smiling bravely, still polite.

You cannot wipe out Paris by removing two million people and closing Cartier's and the Café de Paris. There still remains some hundred miles of boulevards, the Seine and her bridges, the Arc de Triomphe, with the sun setting behind it, and the Gardens of the Tuilleries. You cannot send them to the store-house or wrap them in linen. And the spirit of the people of Paris you cannot crush nor stampede.