and looming cliffs, and wished I could see by some kind of searchlight into the soul of England on this night of fate.  Beyond the cliffs of Dover, in the profound darkness of the night, England seemed asleep.  Did not her people hear the beating of Death’s war drums across the fields of Europe, growing louder 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 gave a final squawk of dismay and disappeared when the theatre of the Petit Guignol was packed up to make way for a more tragic drama.  A hush fell upon Montmartre, and the musicians in its