ot streets to their hotel and
wait. Back they went, disappointed yet half-relieved, to the
resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants,
motionless lifts: to the queer disjointed life of fashionable hotels
suddenly reduced to the intimacies and make-shift of a Latin
Quarter _pension._ Meanwhile it was strange to watch the gradual
paralysis of the city. As the motors, taxis, cabs and vans had
vanished from the streets, so the lively little steamers had left
the Seine. The canal-boats too were gone, or lay motionless: loading
and unloading had ceased. Every great architectural opening framed
an emptiness; all the endless avenues stretched away to desert
distances. In the parks and gardens no one raked the paths or
trimmed the borders. The fountains slept in their basins, the
worried sparrows fluttered unfed, and vague dogs, shaken out of
their daily habits, roamed unquietly, looking for familiar eyes.
Paris, so intensely conscious yet so strangely entranced, seemed to
have had _curare_ injected into all her veins.

The next day--the 2nd of August--from the terrace of the Hotel
de Crillon one looked down on a first faint stir of returning life.
Now and then a taxi-cab or a private motor crossed the Place de la
Concorde, carrying soldiers to the stations. Other conscripts, in
detachments, tramped by on foot with bags and banners. One
detachment stopped before the black-veiled statue of Strasbourg and
laid a garland at her feet. In ordinary times this demonstration
would at once have attracted a crowd; but at the very moment when it
might have been expected to provoke a patriotic outburst it excited
no more attention than if one of the soldiers had turned aside to
give a penny to a beggar. The people crossing the square did not
even stop to look. The meaning of this apparent indifference was
obvious. When an armed nation mobilizes, everybody is busy, and busy
in a definite and pressing way. It is not only the fighters that
mobilize: those who stay behind must do the same. For each French
household, for each individual man or woman in France, war means a
complete reorganization of life. The detachment of conscripts,
unnoticed, paid their tribute to the Cause and passed on...

Looked back on from these sterner months those early days in Paris,
in their setting of grave architecture and summer skies, wear the
light of the ideal and the abstract. The sudden flaming up of
national life, the abeyance of ever