their way to the front.

At Belfort the station was crowded with French troops and an elderly
French couple came into our compartment. The eyes of the wife were red
with weeping, while the man sank into his seat and with his head upon
his breast gazed moodily into vacancy. They had just parted with their
son, who had joined the colors. I stood for a time with this French
gentleman in the corridor of the train, but as he could not speak
English or German and I could not speak French, it was impossible for
us to communicate the intense and tragical thoughts that were passing
through our minds. Suddenly he pointed to the smiling harvest fields,
by which we passed so swiftly, and said "_Perdu! perdu!_" This word
of tragical import could have been applied to all civilization as well.

The night of our arrival in Paris I fully expected to see a half a
million Frenchmen parading the streets and enthusiastically cheering
for war and crying, as in 1870, "a Berlin!" I was to witness an
extraordinary transformation of a great nation. An unusual silence
brooded over the city. A few hundred people paraded the chief avenues,
crying "down with war!", while a separate crowd of equal size sang
the national hymn. With these exceptions there was no cheering or
enthusiasm, such as I would have expected from my preconceived idea of
French excitability. Men spoke in undertones, with a quiet but subdued
intensity of feeling rather than with frenzied enthusiasm.

With a devotion that was extraordinary and a pathetically brave
submission to a possible fate, they seemed to be sternly resolved to
die to the last man, if necessary, in defense of their noble nation.
Although I subsequently saw in the thrilling days of mobilization many
thousands of soldiers pass through the railroad stations on their way
to the front, I never heard the rumble of a drum or saw the waving of
regimental colors.

No sacrifice seemed to be too great, whether it was asked of man,
woman, or child. The spirit of materialism for the time being
vanished. The newspapers shrunk to a single sheet and all commercial
advertisements disappeared. Theaters, art galleries, museums,
libraries, closed their doors. Upon some streets nearly every shop
was closed, with the simple but eloquent placard "Gone to join the
colors." The French people neither exulted, boasted, nor complained.
The only querulous element was a small minority of the large body of
American tourists, so suddenly