that first sunlit silent month the streets to-day show an almost normal activity.  The vanishing of all the motorbuses, and of the huge lumbering commercial vans, leaves many a forgotten perspective open and reveals many a lost grace of architecture; but the taxi-cabs and private motors are almost as abundant as in peace-time, and the peril of pedestrianism is kept at its normal pitch by the incessant dashing to and fro of those unrivalled engines of destruction, the hospital and War Office motors.  Many shops have reopened, a few theatres are tentatively producing patriotic drama or mixed programmes seasonal with sentiment and mirth, and the cinema again unrolls its eventful kilometres.

For a while, in September and October, the streets were made picturesque by the coming and going of English soldiery, and the aggressive flourish of British military motors.  Then the fresh faces and smart uniforms disappeared, and now the nearest approach to “militarism” which Paris offers to the casual sight-seer is the occasional drilling of a handful of piou-pious on the muddy reaches of the Place des Invalides.  But there is another army in Paris.  Its first detachments came months ago, in the dark September days—­lamentable rear-guard of the Allies’ retreat on Paris.  Since then its numbers have grown and grown, its dingy streams have percolated through all the currents of Paris life, so that wherever one goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busy confident strongly-stepping Parisians one sees these other people, dazed and slowly moving—­men and women with sordid bundles on their backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes, children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressed against their shoulders:  the great army of the Refugees.  Their faces are unmistakable and unforgettable.  No one who has ever caught that stare of dumb bewilderment—­or that other look of concentrated horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins—­can shake off the obsession of the Refugees.  The look in their eyes is part of the look of Paris.  It is the dark shadow on the brightness of the face she turns to the enemy.  These poor people cannot look across the borders to eventual triumph.  They belong mostly to a class whose knowledge of the world’s affairs is measured by the shadow of their village steeple.  They are no more curious of the laws of causation than the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano.  They were ploughing and sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them.  And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying.  These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet, or intelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a meal-ticket—­and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes...