At the Chamber of Deputies, Premier Clemenceau, faultlessly attired and gloved, tells the French people that the greatest war of all time has come to an end—Clemenceau, who nearly fifty years before as a member of this same assembly, voted against surrender to Germany. As his proud, clear voice rings out, the guns of victory roar a distant accompaniment. Wild applause greets his reading of the terms of the armistice, especially marked at those paragraphs dealing with the return of the lost provinces of Alsace-Lorraine, the abandonment of submarine warfare, the occupation of the left bank of the Rhine.
For once there are no political factions in the Chamber. For once lefts, rights and centers applaud and cheer as one. Even the Socialists are among those to surround the Premier as he leaves the platform, and congratulate him. Some one begins the Marseillaise. Immediately applause, laughter and cheering are hushed. The Deputies stand erect and sing in unison the hymn of the French Republic. The vast crowd which has been thronging the galleries and corridors takes it up. It is carried to the hundreds massed on the stairs and perched on the railings. From group to group, as far as one can see, the song is carried along the current of exultant humanity. Men and women fox-trotting in the public squares and dancing in circles pause to sing. Then back to their dancing. Another circle farther on takes up the hymn. And so it goes, from the House of Deputies to the boulevards, and along the boulevards to the bridges. From the Bastille to the Madeleine, down Rue Royale to the great corral of captured German guns in the Place de la Concorde, up the Champs Elysées, on and on and on. It is Paris triumphant.
Other nations take up the Marseillaise, sing it and their national anthems—the Star-Spangled Banner, God Save the King.
British soldiers on leave begin a procession and go shouting and singing down the boulevard. Columns of Americans, French and Belgians follow their example. Women throw themselves into the arms of the marching soldiers, kiss them and are off again. At the Elysée Palace the procession halts just long enough to sing the national anthems of the allied nations, in succession, and marches on.
Crowded motor busses and other vehicles find every highway blocked, and the passengers dismount and join the throngs. Men and women who have never met before join hands, embrace, kiss, dance and sing. Every public square, the street before every outdoor café, the great hall of St. Lazarre station—yesterday the receiving station of the wounded—become dance halls.
On the steps of L’Opera a Scotch band is blaring. It is one of a hundred bands playing simultaneously.
There is a deluge of wine. Countless bottles are uncorked or impatiently cracked open at the cafés. Men and women dart down the streets brandishing bottles and sharing their contents with others. American soldiers forget the regulation against liquor.
They forget another regulation—General Order 40, forbidding colored men to talk to French women. The French have not learned to draw the color line. French midinettes and society women join hands with the colored men who have saved France, as freely as with the whites. An aristocratic Parisienne embraces an Alabama negro, while the latter grins good-naturedly, and the celebrators form a circle about the two.
“They’d sure lynch him for that,” sneers another Alabama soldier, white, with a scowl, as he leans tipsily against the railing of La Madeleine. It is the one note of discord in the otherwise perfect harmony of the moment.
“I say,” his voice rises petulantly, “they’d lynch him—” But the men in uniform about him are English, French, Italian. Can’t explain a thing like that to Tommies, Frog-eaters or Wops. Probably wouldn’t know what lynching meant anyway. And they treated niggers like white people.