d then turned to me to confirm
his views on this fatal strategic and tactical error of the French. After
all, he was more pertinent than most of the military experts trying to
write on the basis of the military bulletins. It was droll to listen to
this sartorial discourse, when at least two hundred thousand men
lay dead and wounded from that day's fight on the soil of France.
Red trousers were responsible for the death of a lot of those men.

Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvest
lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the
work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to an hotel
with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking
busily in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the
clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to
door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre's request that
everyone should go on with his day's work.

"They're done!" said an American in the foyer. "The French cannot
stand up against the Germans--anybody could see that! It's too bad,
but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the
next day."

I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all
one's belief in the French army and in the real character of the
French people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of
democracy; it meant disaster to all one's precepts; a personal
disaster.

"Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the
power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not
had their battle yet!" I said.

And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with
lots of fight left in it.

Ill
Paris Waits

It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city--a Paris
without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the
shutters of its shops down and its cafes and restaurants in gloomy
emptiness.

The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller; the Paris of the
boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist; the Paris that
sparkled and smiled in entertainment; the Paris exploited to
the average American through Sunday supplements and the
reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead.
Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no other Paris
departed as from the tomb of the pleasures which had been the
passing extravaganza of relief, from dull lives el