At dawn and dusk in Paris one was likely to hear the familiar buzz of the aeroplane, and looking aloft could detect a dark spot in the clear June sky—one of the aerial guard that keeps perpetual watch over Paris. Sometimes when I came home at night through the dark streets I could see the silver beams of their searchlights sweeping like a friendly comet through the heavens, or watch the dimmed lamp glowing like a red Mars among the lower stars, rising and falling from space to space. Often I was awakened in the gray dawn by the persistent hum of this winged sentry and looked down from my balcony into the misty city beneath, securely sleeping, thanks to the incessant watchfulness of these "eyes of Paris." The aviator would make wide circles above the silent city, then swiftly turn back toward Issy and breakfast. Thanks to the activity of the aerial guard the Zeppelins have done very little damage in Paris and latterly have made no attempts to sneak down on the city. It is too risky. They have succeeded in killing some peaceable folk near the Gare du Nord, in dropping one bomb on Notre Dame, I believe,—for which they have less excuse than even for Louvain or Rheims,—and in making a big hole close to the Trocadero. This after all the vaunted terrors of the Zeppelins! What they have done, what they could do at the best is of the nature of petty damage and occasional murder. Instead of terrorizing the Parisians the Zeppelin raids have merely roused a vivid sense of sportsmanship and curiosity among them—at first they had a real réclame!
Day by day as I lived in Paris the city took on more of its ordinary activities and aspects. More people flowed by along the boulevards or sat at the tables in front of the cafés, more shops opened—even the great dressmaking establishments began to operate in an attempt to restore commercial circulation. More transients flitted through the city. There were more people of a Sunday in the Bois and at Vincennes. Considering that less than a year before the national government had left Paris, together with a million of its people, also that the battle-line had remained all these months almost within hearing, it was marvelous how quietly much of the ordinary machinery of life had been set running again. Yet Paris was not the same. It was a Paris almost wholly stripped to the outward eye of that parasitic luxury with which it has catered to the self-indulgent of the world. Paris—as had been the case with Italy—had returned under the stress of its tragedy to its best self—a suffering, tense, deeply earnest self. If the nation conquers—and there is not a Frenchman who believes any other solution possible—victory will be of the highest significance to the race. It will fix in the French people another character wrought in suffering—a deeper, nobler, purer character than her enemies, or her friends for that matter, have believed her to possess. Paris will never again become so totally submerged in the business of providing international frivolities. She has lived too long in the face of death.
II
The Wounds of France
The wounds of France are still bleeding. The trench wall still lies for four hundred miles across the fair face of the country from the Vosges to the North Sea, and the invader rules some of her richest provinces, in all an area equal to something less than a tenth of the whole.
The wounds have already begun to heal in the marvelous manner of nature: already life has begun again in the valley of the Marne; the vineyards and grainfields run close up to the front trenches. Yet even where the scar has covered the wound it is plain enough to see how deep that wound has been. The scorched and bruised valley of the Marne, the ruined villages of Champagne and Artois, have been described many times by visiting journalists, yet it is worth while to record once more some of the outstanding features of this rape of France.
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To begin with Senlis, which is one of the nearest points to Paris reached by the German cyclone in September, 1914. There are fewer older towns in France than Senlis, thirty miles or so northeast of Paris, the center of the old "Island of France." Once a Roman camp whose stout masonry walls can still be seen for considerable distances, it had a mediaeval castle, and, until the greater grandeur of Beauvais stole the honor, was a bishopric with a lovely small Gothic cathedral. Its lofty gray spire dominates the green fields and thick woods in the midst of which Senlis sleeps away the modern day. There are other curious and beautiful examples of Gothic building in Senlis: indeed, just here, the experts find the first workings of the principles of pure Gothic architecture, transforming the round-arched, thick-walled Norman building. If for nothing more Senlis would have amply earned its right to live always as the birthplace of French Gothic.
What happened to Senlis when the German troops visited it can be seen at a glance to-day. From the railroad station at one end of the town to the green fields beyond the hospital on the Chantilly road at the other end, a black swath of burned and ruined buildings is the memento. These houses and stores were not shelled: they were burned methodically. The Germans arrived late in the afternoon of the 2d of September, in that state of nervous excitement and hysterical fear of francs-tirailleurs that characterized them from the time they passed Liége. The Mayor of Senlis, an old man over seventy, was made to understand that he would be held responsible for the conduct of the citizens, and was ordered to have water and lights turned on in the town and a dinner for the German staff prepared at the chief hotel. While he was busy with these commands,—most of the inhabitants had fled that morning,—shots were exchanged in the lower end of the town between the Germans and the retreating French. Thereupon the usual order to burn and destroy was given, and the buildings along the main thoroughfare were set on fire. The mayor and six other citizens, gathered haphazard on the streets, were taken to a field outside the town and shot. There were other moving and significant incidents in the occupation of Senlis which are well authenticated, characteristic of the German method, but need not be repeated here.
The older part of the town, the cathedral, the Roman wall fortunately escaped with only a few chance shell holes here and there. The black scar runs through the place from end to end, incontrovertible instance of the German thing, which has been visited by thousands of French and foreigners the past year. The wounds of Senlis are not deep: by comparison with much else done by the Germans they are almost trivial. The murder of the Mayor of Senlis was not a large crime in the German scale. But the whole is nicely typical: Senlis is the kindergarten lesson in the German method of making war.