How Paris Dropped Gayety
By Anne Rittenhouse.
[From The New York Times, Sept. 23, 1914.]
On Friday night the Grand Boulevards were alive with people, motors, voitures, singing, dancing, and each café thronged by the gayest light hearts in the world.
On Saturday night the boulevards were thronged with growling, ominous, surging crowds, with faces like those of the Commune, speaking strong words for and against war.
On Sunday night mobs tore down signs, broke windows, shouted the "Marseillaise," wreaked their vengeance on those who belonged to a nation that France thought had plunged their country into ghastly war. Aliens sought shelter; hotels closed their massive doors intended for defense. Mounted troops corralled the mobs as cowboys round up belligerent cattle. Detached groups smashed and mishandled things that came in the way.
Monday night a calm so intense that one felt frightened. Boulevards deserted, cafés closed, hotels shuttered. Patrols of the Civil Garde in massed formation. France was keeping her pledge to high civilization. Yellow circulars were pasted on the buildings warning all that France was in danger and appealing by that token to all male citizens to guard the women and the weak.
At daylight only was the dead silence broken; France was marching to war at that hour. Will any one who was here forget that daily daybreak tramp, that measured march of the thousands going to the front? Cavalry with the sun striking the helmets; infantry with their scarlet overcoats too large; aviators with their boxed machines, the stormy petrels of modern war; and the dogs, veritably the dogs of war, going on the humanest mission of all, to search for the wounded in the woods of battle.
And, side by side with the marching millions, on the pavement, were the women belonging to them; the women who were to stay behind.
As though the Judgment Trumpet had sounded, France was changed in the twinkling of an eye. And added to that subconscious terror that lurked in every American soul of another revolution—a terror that was dispelled after the third day when France reached out her long arm and mobilized her people into a strong component whole with but one heart, was an inexplainable dread of this terrible calm.