orchestras packed up their instruments and scurried with scared faces—­to Berlin, Vienna, and Budapesth.  No more boats went up to Sevres and St. Cloud with crowds of pleasure-seekers.  The Seine was very quiet beneath its bridges, and in the Pavilion Bleu no dainty creatures sat sipping rose-tinted ices or slapped the hands of the beaky-nosed boys who used to pay for them.  The women were hiding in their rooms, asking God—­even before the war they used to ask God funny questions—­how they were going to live now that their lovers had gone away to fight, leaving them with nothing but the memory of a last kiss wet with tears.  It was not enough to live on for many days.

2

During the last days of July and the first days of August Paris was stunned by the shock of this menace, which was approaching swiftly and terribly.  War!  But why?  Why, in the name of God, should France be forced into a war for which she was not prepared, for which she had no desire, because Austria had issued an ultimatum to Servia, demanding the punishment of a nation of cut-throats for the murder of an unnecessary Archduke?  Germany was behind the business, Germany was forcing the pace, exasperating Russia, presenting a grim face to France and rattling the sword in its scabbard so that it resounded through Europe.  Well, let her rattle, so long as France could keep out of the whole affair and preserve that peace in which she had built up prosperity since the nightmare of 1870!

L’annee terrible!  There were many people in France who remembered that tragic year, and now, after forty-four years, the memory came back, and they shuddered.  They had seen the horrors of war and knew the meaning of it—­its waste of life, its sacrifice of splendid young manhood, its wanton cruelties, its torture of women, its misery and destruction.  France had been brought to her knees then and had suffered the last humiliations which may be inflicted upon a proud nation.  But she had recovered miraculously, and gradually even her desire for revenge, the passionate hope that one day she might take vengeance for all those indignities and cruelties, had cooled down and died.  Not even for vengeance was war worth while.  Not even to recover the lost provinces was it worth the lives of all those thousands of young men who must give their blood as the price of victory.  Alsace and Lorraine were only romantic memories, kept alive by a few idealists and hotheads, who once a year went to the statue in the Place de la Concorde and deposited wreaths and made enthusiastic speeches which rang false, and pledged their allegiance to the lost provinces—­“Quand meme!” There was a good deal of blague in these annual ceremonies, laughed at by Frenchmen of common sense.  Alsace and Lorraine had been Germanized.  A Frenchman would find few people there to speak his own tongue.  The old ties of sentiment had worn very thin, and there was not a party in France who would have dared to advocate a war with Germany for the sake of this territory.  Such a policy would have been a crime against France itself, who had abandoned the spirit of vengeance, and had only one ambition—­to pursue its ideals and its business in peace.