- from the British magazine
- T.P.'s Journal of
- 'Great Deeds of the Great War'
- April 10, 1915
Paris in War-Time
A Serious City
A CURIOUS and anomalous thing has been born of the War. It is the reversal of ideas as far as France and Britain are concerned, or, rather, as far as the heart of France, which is Paris, and Britain which is London, are concerned. The capitals have changed places. Each is asking in war what the other demanded in peace.
Brave Paris, Gay London
It is a singular state of things. Paris, the city of laughter in peace, is asking for more gaiety; London is asking for more gravity. Paris wants its theatres opened; it has won back fancy bread, and is hinting at the return of its racing events; London is in two minds whether racing should be suppressed or not, and wishes to know whether the right note of seriousness is being struck. It is a curious reversal, but it is a natural one. Gay France, in its danger, grows grave; grave Britain, in its anxiety, grows a little insouciant. It is the habit of two different races meaning the same thing in the end. Now that the peoples of the races feel a little more secure, they are reverting to their old emotions of existence. France wishes to laugh; Britain desires to take things seriously.
The Streets Grow Crowded
France is invaded. She is nearer the enemy, who still holds grimly to her northern lands. But France's anxious moments are passed, and to all intents and purposes the country is very much as Britain is to-day. Paris, in its own genre, is exceedingly like London, with an additional flavour of war thrown in. The omnibuses are coming again on to the streets; the taxi-cabs are growing as numerous and as deadly as ever; the boulevards are becoming vivid and crowded once more the shopping in the main centres is briskening, and shutters are being taken down from those stores that hermetically sealed themselves when the heavy gunnery of Prussia was heard outside the Paris fortifications and the Government betook itself to Bordeaux.
An Arabesque of Arms
Paris is becoming its old self again. There are differences. The tango has gone; a grave serenity has usurped the place of the old quick and eager vivacity. There are more soldiers than of old (though it is said that not half as many are met as in the streets of London), and the types of these soldiers are more varied. Paris has been invaded by strange troops that it knew before mainly by name - the vivid Zouave, the barocque Turco, the richly decorative Spahi are walking under the trees, and are painting the streets with a more vivid and dramatic colour than le piou-piou, with his red and overmastering trousers and his redundant cavalry boots, ever gave to the city. Together with this bright arabesquery of Algeria, the drab athleticness of the British Tommy moves about with a hard and workman-like contrast that the Parisians find adorable.
A City of Hospitals
Paris to-day is a City of soldiers, mainly because it has become, among other things, a city of hospitals. It has become the clearing house for the French, and some-times the British wounded. here the smitten men come are kept if their cases are grave, are sent on if they can be moved, though Paris is-anxious to keep all the hurt she can. She is filling her hospitals with the maimed men, and she is filling her streets with hospitals to take the overflow. All manner of strange roofs have been seized for this great and charitable purpose. Theatres of the drama have become theatres of pain and the alleviation of pain; hotels have dressed their great rooms and floors with beds, and again beds, to take the smitten men; railway stations, like the P.L.M., that saw so many lighthearted travellers off to the suns of the Riviera, have consecrated their corridors and waiting rooms to the wounded.
Private House and Grand Palais
Private houses are drawn into this benevolent scheme also. In every street you find them, but the most evident is the ambulance, the branch hospital. The need must he great indeed, since we have reached No. 178 already. No. 177 was opened last week, and had twenty-six wounded in its beds within twenty-four hours, and the next and most recent is installed in the Grand Palais, and was opened yesterday. Wherever you go you see that white signboard with the Red Cross, and the number that it bears in the lists. Some of these branch hospitals consist of the four or more floors of some empty house; others are in a large hotel, transformed hastily for the purpose. The huge Grand Palais will accommodate very many beds, but is hard, if not impossible to warm.
Little Brother "Taube”
Yet, though there are soldiers in plenty in Paris, though the motor-buses give them joy- rides in their convalescence, though the vivid little midinettes make heroes of them, and the nursemaids adore them, Paris is not all soldiers. It has its own preoccupations and its witty indulgences. It has, for instance, found an amusement in the Taube.
Nothing shows this more clearly than the way in which the "Taube " is scoffed at (says the Paris correspondent of the Westminster Gazette). London is, to however slight an extent, perturbed by the threat of a Zeppelin invasion; hut the Zeppelin has made no progress with the easier task of destroying Paris, and its little brother, the "Taube," is looked upon rather as a joke. "A good day for Taubes," I heard, first thing on Sunday morning, when the sky was grey with dense clouds, and there was hardly a breath of wind. "No Taubes to-day? They like to come on Sunday, between eleven and twelve- where are they? " a little later.
The Women Who Work, and Weep
True, the Taube and the Zeppelin are things warlike enough; but when one talks of Paris being itself again, one does not mean to say that Paris has become unnatural, and ignores war. With so many of its brave sons away, with so many women working in their places - in the booking offices, as postmen, as porters, as almost everything under the sun-with so many weeping for the men who will never come back to the posts they have kept open for them, Paris faces the War in an everyday manner, is, indeed, absorbed by the War. Her jokes are War jokes; her children stories have the flavour of arms in them.
The Work of the Fathers
The infants, the raconteurs tell, talk nothing else but of the military doings of their conscript fathers.
The first question young girls ask (says the Evening Standard) each other is, "What is your daddy doing? " Then each in turn tells her little tale.
Here is Antoinette, whose father is one of the handsomest barristers in the Palais de Justice. "My father," she explains, "is a motor-cyclist. He goes every day with a string of motor-buses from the slaughter-house to the front to take fresh meat to the troops."
"Tiens, that is droll," say the others. "Imagine to yourselves Antoinette's father is acting butcher! " And everyone laughs till the mistress calls them to order.
The father of another is a transport lorry driver - he is a novelist in peace; and a third child says :
a relative of the leading tenor of the Paris Opera, gravely relates that her illustrious uncle is a gravedigger, and he sometimes spends all day digging till his hands are sore, and burying the poor horses that have been killed on the battlefield. The idea of the adored tenor thus employed delights the children, as indeed it does other circles.
The Patriotic Hens of the Midi
When Paris can tell children's stories, it must be normal. As far as events allow, it is. Life has returned to its natural orbit, conditions are equable, prices are usual.
Paris has just come hack to fancy bread, while our friends the enemy are reduced to an unsavoury compound in which potato flour figures quite a good deal. So, in spite of the Wolff Bureau, Parisians are in no danger of being starved out. Never at any time had they much reason to take in reefs in their belt hands. Meat was dear, of course, but then it always is at famine price, and coals are worth their weight in copper, I should think; but the Parisian who has been accustomed in peace time to paying £3 a ton does not much mind in war making it guineas. Eggs for several months have not been eggs, but much more like chickens. However, that is getting better, as the hens in the Midi, we learn, are laying with patriotic enthusiasm, and large consignments of their produce are daily arriving in Paris. The restaurants have not raised their prices; indeed, some of them announced substantial reductions for the duration of the War - in their windows. On their bills it is a different matter. Fruit and vegetables have been plenteous, excellent, and of normal price. Altogether, it is extremely different from January forty- four years ago.
The Actors
The shoe pinches in places, of course. In London the actors have been badly hit, we know. In Paris their case is more dolorous. The correspondent of the Daily Telegraph describes their plight:
There is not much playgoing for a nation in arms. London theatres carry on the torch, but almost all the theatres of Paris are closed and dark. The War hits hard the great world of little Parisian actors and actresses, the only French people who are impatiently and obstinately improvident. The stars do not shine, but they live comfortably. They have savings and banking accounts. The lesser ones never put a penny by, and I have watched discreetly some pathetic sights a comedian, third or fourth rate, still a comedian who made his living quite well at music-halls in peace time, actually selling the three p.m. communiqué for a penny on the boulevards; actresses, of the same rate, who are still well dressed and talk smartly in playgoers' cafés, but dine often off a glass of vermouth in the café.
Dinners and Cheques
Their case is sad; but it is being alleviated in a delicate and worthy way:
Too proud they all are to complain. But discreet help is being arranged for them. In a certain restaurant they can get meals free, no questions asked, and it is pathetic to see comic basses and sentimental sopranos, who once were the stars of fifth-rate café concerts, slipping into the restaurant, eating their free meals, and trying to look as if there would be at dessert a bill to pay. This restaurant is run by three or four generous and tactful heads of the profession, who have thus found a quiet means of helping their lower brethren. Another fund of a different kind is now being started, the "pret d'honneur," which will send cheques quietly to actors and actresses out of work. They will meet their I.O.U.'s after the War, when they like and as they like.
“Vive Ia France, Quand Meme"
These are the sad moments of Parisian life. There are many. There will, perhaps, be many more before the War is ended. Paris recognises them; meets them with sympathetic energy. And sad though these things may be, they yet give rise to moments of sublime heroism.
The wife of a soldier learned that her husband's regiment was in the neighbourhood of Paris. She took her baby, and went out to give him a pleasant surprise. She asked for the adjutant of her husband's company. “Can I see my husband?" she said, giving her name. The officer stammered and grew pale. "Madame," he said, "have courage. Your husband fell nobly at my side. We all loved him." The wife stood for a moment without moving. Then, with a noble gesture that was pure Greek and pure heroism, she raised her baby above her head and cried, "Vive Ia France, quand meme." Then she turned and walked firmly away back to her widowed home.
The Women
That is a story of quiet valour too noble and holy for tears. It is an example of the quiet spirit of sacrifice in Paris. All the women of Paris seem simple in their sorrow. This is how the Times sees the average Parisienne
Yet how simple is their attitude! They go about their daily tasks with perfect calm. They order their households with consoling regularity, they pursue their charities with quiet unobtrusiveness, they discuss the military situation with intelligence, and they do all their weeping when none can see.
All Heroines
And even the butterfly woman has her habit of wry valour:
But it is not only the woman with family cares who is admirable in these days. It is also the gay little butterfly person. She, too, is playing her part very bravely, and to see her looking trim and neat, but a little graver than usual, is quite as encouraging as is the sight of the brave mere de famille. She walks on the boulevard in the evening hoping to see a German aeroplane in the sky, and to have the excitement of rushing to see a bomb fall. and her incorrigible habit of making fun even when things are at their worst is a precious gift in these days of strain and suspense. Her gay, brave voice, her twisted smile, are splendid things to hear and see after suffering from the depression of watching overloaded trains depart to the south or to Havre.
The colour, the laughter, the bustle, the affliction, and the bravery are all threads in the fabric of everyday life now. London has them, Paris has them; it is part of the social existence. With her wit for Taubes, as well as with her eyes for tears, Paris has come back to a life that is everyday, as far as conditions permit. She reads her thin, single- sheet newspapers, she discusses the communiqués, and revels in her rumours. “The last time I crossed the Channel," writes a journalist, "I was assured, on arriving in Paris the same night, that the boat by which I had crossed had been sunk by a submarine in the course of its journey, and that neither I nor anyone else had been saved," even as London does. She has come back through the emotional cycles of war to her old social round.
