So, gradually, we fell into the habit of living under martial law.  After the first days of flustered adjustment the personal inconveniences were so few that one felt almost ashamed of their not being more, of not being called on to contribute some greater sacrifice of comfort to the Cause.  Within the first week over two thirds of the shops had closed—­the greater number bearing on their shuttered windows the notice “Pour cause de mobilisation,” which showed that the “patron” and staff were at the front.  But enough remained open to satisfy every ordinary want, and the closing of the others served to prove how much one could do without.  Provisions were as cheap and plentiful as ever, though for a while it was easier to buy food than to have it cooked.  The restaurants were closing rapidly, and one often had to wander a long way for a meal, and wait a longer time to get it.  A few hotels still carried on a halting life, galvanized by an occasional inrush of travel from Belgium and Germany; but most of them had closed or were being hastily transformed into hospitals.

The signs over these hotel doors first disturbed the dreaming harmony of Paris.  In a night, as it seemed, the whole city was hung with Red Crosses.  Every other building showed the red and white band across its front, with “Ouvroir” or “Hopital” beneath; there was something sinister in these preparations for horrors in which one could not yet believe, in the making of bandages for limbs yet sound and whole, the spreading of pillows for heads yet carried high.  But insist as they would on the woe to come, these warning signs did not deeply stir the trance of Paris.  The first days of the war were full of a kind of unrealizing confidence, not boastful or fatuous, yet as different as possible from the clear-headed tenacity of purpose that the experience of the next few months was to develop.  It is hard to evoke, without seeming to exaggerate it, that the mood of early August:  the assurance, the balance, the kind of smiling fatalism with which Paris moved to her task.  It is not impossible that the beauty of the season and the silence of the city may have helped to produce this mood.  War, the shrieking fury, had announced herself by a great wave of stillness.  Never was desert hush more complete:  the silence of a street is always so much deeper than the silence of wood or field.

The heaviness of the August air intensified this impression of suspended life.  The days were dumb enough; but at night the hush became acute.  In the quarter I inhabit, always deserted in summer, the shuttered streets were mute as catacombs, and the faintest pin-prick of noise seemed to tear a rent in a black pall of silence.  I could hear the tired tap of a lame hoof half a mile away, and the tread of the policeman guarding the Embassy across the street beat against the pavement like a series of detonations.  Even the variegated noises of the city’s waking-up had ceased.  If any sweepers, scavengers or rag-pickers still plied their trades they did it as secretly as ghosts.  I remember one morning being roused out of a deep sleep by a sudden explosion of noise in my room.  I sat up with a start, and found I had been waked by a low-voiced exchange of “Bonjours” in the street...