“I found them in a trench we shared with the English,” he explained.  “These puttees are English; a soldier gave them to me.”  He exhibited his legs with a good deal of satisfaction.

I examined the papers that had been given me.  The first was a medical prescription for an anti-lice ointment and the second an illiterate letter extremely difficult to decipher, mostly about somebody whom the writer was having trouble to manage, “now that you aren’t here.”  I translated as well as I could for an attentive audience.  “Toujours les totos,” they cried merrily when I explained the prescription.  A spirit of good-fellowship pervaded the compartment, till even the suspicious civilian unbent, and handed round post-card photographs of his two sons who were somewhere en Champagne.  Not a one of the three soldiers could have been much over twenty-one, but they were not boys, but men, serious men, tried and disciplined by war.  The homely one gave me one of his many medals which he wore “to please the good Sisters”; on one side in an oval of seven stars was the Virgin Mary, and on the other, the determined features of General Joffre.

Just at sundown we crossed the great plain of La Beauce.  Distant villages and pointed spires stood silhouetted in violet-black against the burning midsummer sky and darkness was falling upon the sweeping golden plain.  We passed hamlet after hamlet closed and shuttered, though the harvests had been gathered and stacked.  There was something very tragic in those deserted, outlying farms.  The train began to rattle through the suburbs of Paris.  By the window stood the Norman looking out on the winking red and violet lights of the railroad yard.  “This Paris?” he asked.  “I never expected to see Paris.  How the war sets one to traveling!”

Chapter 2

An Unknown Paris in the Night and Rain

It was Sunday morning, the bells were ringing to church, and I was strolling in the gardens of the Tuileries.  A bright morning sun was drying the dewy lawns and the wet marble bodies of the gods and athletes, the leaves on the trees were falling, and the French autumn, so slow, so golden, and so melancholy, had begun.  At the end of the mighty vista of the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe rose, brown and vaporous in the exhalations of the quiet city, and an aeroplane was maneuvering over the Place de la Concorde, a moving speck of white and silver in the soft, September blue.  From a near-by Punch and Judy show the laughter of little children floated down the garden in outbursts of treble shrillness.  “Villain, monster, scoundrel,” squeaked a voice.  Flopped across the base of the stage, the arms hanging downwards, was a prostrate doll which a fine manikin in a Zouave’s uniform belabored with a stick; suddenly it stirred, and, with a comic effect, lifted its puzzled, wooden head to the laughing children.  Beneath a little Prussian helmet was the head of William of Germany, caricatured with Parisian skill into a scowling, green fellow with a monster black mustache turned up to his eyes.  “Lie down!” cried the Zouave doll imperiously.  “Here is a love pat for thee from a French Zouave, my big Boche.”  And he struck him down again with his staff.