" asked Dalton.

But conversation soon faded out between us, as we made our way through
etched mysteries of black and silver under thickset leafless branches.
An occasional light beckoned us from far ahead down our pavement vista;
for Paris had not yet fully become that city--not of dreadful--but of
majestic and beautiful night we were later to know, and to love with so
changed and grave a passion.

It was just after we had crossed the Rond-Point that the first seven or
eight bombs in swift even succession shatteringly fell. They were not
near enough to us to do more than root us to the spot with amazement.

"What the _hell_?" muttered Dalton, holding my eyes....

Then, very far off, a curious thin wailing noise began, increasing
rapidly, rising to an eerie scream which doubled and redoubled in volume
as it was taken up in other quarters and came to us in intricately
rhythmic waves.

"Sirens," said Dalton. "The _pompiers_ are out. I guess they've come,
damn them, eh?"

"Seems so," I answered. "Yes; there go the lights. I must get to Neuilly
at once--a sick friend. So long, old man."

"Hold on!" he called after me. "Don't be an ass!"

To my impatient annoyance, for they impeded my progress, knots of people
had sprung everywhere from the darkness and were standing now in open
spots, in the full moonlight, murmuring together, as they stared with
backward-craned necks up into the spotless sky....

So, with crashing, sinister, unresolved chords, began the Straussian
overture to the great Boche symphony, _Gott Strafe Paris_, played to its
impotent conclusion throughout those bitter spring months of the year of
our wonderment, 1918! Ninety-one bombs were dropped that night within
the old fortifications; more than two hundred were showered on the
_banlieue_. No subsequent raid was to prove equally destructive of
property or life, and it was disturbingly evident that, for the time
being at least, the shadowy air lanes to Paris lay broadly open to the
foe.

Yet, for some reason unexplained, the Gothas did not immediately or
soon return. Followed a hush of rather more than a month, during which
Paris worked breathlessly to improve its air defenses and protect its
more precious monuments. Comically ugly little sausage-balloons--gorged
caterpillars, they seemed, raw yellow with pale green articulations and
loathsome, floppy appendages--were moored in the squares and public
gardens; mountains of sand bags were heaped abou