and
louder, so that on a cross-Channel boat I heard it booming in my
ears, louder than the wind?

Chapter II
Mobilization

1

The thunderbolt came out of a blue sky and in the midst of a brilliant
sunshine which gleamed blindingly above the white houses of Paris
and flung back shadows from the poplars across the long straight
roads between the fields of France. The children were playing as
usual in the gardens of the Tuileries, and their white-capped nurses
were sewing and chatting in the shade of the scorched trees. The old
bird man was still calling "Viens! Viens!" to the sparrows who came to
perch on his shoulders and peck at the bread between his lips, and
Punch was still performing his antique drama in the Petit Guignol to
laughing audiences of boys and girls. The bateaux mouches on the
Seine were carrying heavy loads of pleasure-seekers to Sevres and
other riverside haunts. In the Pavilion Bleu at St. Cloud elegant little
ladies of the demi-monde sipped rose-tinted ices and said for a
thousand times; "Ciel, comme il fait chaud!" and slapped the hands of
beaky-nosed young men with white slips beneath their waistcoats
and shiny boots and other symbols of a high civilization. Americans in
Panama hats sauntered down the Rue de Rivoli, staring in the shop
windows at the latest studies of nude women, and at night went in
pursuit of adventure to Montmartre, where the orchestras at the Bal
Tabarin were still fiddling mad tangoes in a competition of shrieking
melody and where troops of painted ladies in the Folies Bergeres still
paraded in the promenoir with languorous eyes, through wafts of
sickly scent. The little tables were all along the pavements of the
boulevards and the terrasses were crowded with all those bourgeois
Frenchmen and their women who do not move out of Paris even in
the dogdays, but prefer the scenery of their familiar streets to that of
Dieppe and Le Touquet. It was the same old Paris--crowded with
Cook's tourists and full of the melody of life as it is played by the hoot
of motor horns, the clang of steam trams, the shrill-voiced camelots
shouting "La Presse! La Presse!" and of the light laughter of women.

Then suddenly the thunderbolt fell with its signal of war, and in a few
days Paris was changed as though by some wizard's spell. Most of
the children vanished from the Tuileries gardens with their white-
capped nurses, and the sparrows searched in vain for their bird man.
Punch