a surgeon's knife with a fine and delicate skill, stood in readiness for the maimed victims of the war. The best brains of French medical science were mobilized in these hospitals of Paris. But the wounded did not come to Paris until the war had dragged on for weeks. After the Battle of the Marne, when the wounded were pouring into Orleans and other towns at the rate of seven thousand a day, when it was utterly impossible for the doctors there to deal with all that tide of agony, and when the condition of the French wounded was a scandal to the name of a civilized country, the hospitals of Paris remained empty, or with a few lightly wounded men in a desert of beds. Because they could not speak French, perhaps, these rare arrivals were mostly Turcos and Senegalese, so that when they awakened in these wards and their eyes rolled round upon the white counterpanes, the exquisite flowers and the painted ceilings, and there beheld the beauty of women bending over their bedsides-women whose beauty was famous through Europe -they murmured "Allahu akbar" in devout ecstasy and believed themselves in a Mohammedan paradise.

It was a comedy in which there was a frightful tragedy. The doctors and surgeons standing by these empty beds, wandering through operating-theaters magnificently appointed, asked God why their hands were idle when so many soldiers of France were dying for lack of help, and why Paris, the nerve center of all railway lines, so close to the front, where the fields were heaped with the wreckage of the war, should be a world away from any work of rescue. It was the same old strain of falsity which always runs through French official life. "Politics!" said the doctors of Paris; "those cursed politics!"

But it was fear this time. The government was afraid of wounded were diverted from the capital, wandering on long and devious journeys, side-tracked for hours, and if any ambulances came it was at night, when they glided through back streets under cover of darkness, afraid of being seen.

They need not have feared, those ministers of France. Paris had more courage than some of them, with a greater dignity and finer faith. When the French ministry fled to Bordeaux without having warned the people that the enemy was at their gates, Paris remained very quiet and gave no sign of wild terror or panic-stricken rage. There was no political cry or revolutionary outburst. No mob orator sprang upon a café chair to

say "Nous sommes trahis!" ... There was not even a word of rebuke for those who had doctored the official communiqués and put a false glamour of hope upon hideous facts. Hurriedly and dejectedly over a million people fled from the city, now that the government had led the way of flight. They were afraid, and there was panic in their exodus, but even that was not hysterical, and men and women kept their heads, though they had lost their hopes. It was rare to see a weeping woman. There was no wailing of a people distraught. Sadly those fugitives left the city which had been all the world to them, and the roads to the south were black with their multitudes, having left in fear but full of courage on the road, dejected, but even then finding a comedy in the misery of it, laughing-as most French women will laugh in the hour of peril-even when their suffering was greatest and there was a heartache in their humor.

After all the soul of Paris did not die, even in those dark days when so many of its inhabitants had gone, and when, for a little while, it seemed a deserted city. Many thousands of citizens remained, enough to make a great population, and although for a day or two they kept for the most part indoors, under the shadow of a fear that at any moment they might hear the first shells come shrieking overhead, or even the clatter of the German cavalry, they quickly resumed the daily routine of their lives, as far as it was possible at such a time.

After the battle of the Marne the old vitality of Paris was gradually restored. The people who had fled by hundreds of thousands dribbled back steadily from England and provincial towns where they had hated their exile and had been ashamed of their flight. They came back to their small flats or attic rooms rejoicing to find all safe under a layer of dust-shedding tears, some of them, when they saw the children's toys, which had been left in a litter on the floor, and the open piano with a song on the music-rack, which a girl had left as she rose in the middle of a bar, wavering off into a cry of fear, and all the domestic treasures which had been gathered through a life of toil and abandoned-forever it seemed-when the enemy was reported within twenty miles of Paris in irresistible strength. The city had been saved. The Germans were in full retreat. The great shadow of fear had been lifted and the joy of a great hope thrilled through the soul of Paris, in spite of all that death

là-bas, where so many young men were making sacrifices of their lives for France.

The wounded were allowed at last to come to Paris and the surgeons who had stood with idle hands found more than enough work to do, and the ladies of France who had put on nurses' dresses walked very softly and swiftly through long wards, no longer thrilled with the beautiful sentiment of smoothing the brows of handsome young soldiers, but thrilled by the desperate need of service, hard and ugly and terrible, among those poor bloody men, agonizing through the night, helpless in their pain, moaning before the rescue of death.

Into the streets of Paris, therefore, came the convalescents and the lightly wounded, and one-armed or one-legged officers or simple "poilus" with bandaged heads and hands could be seen in any restaurant among comrades who had not yet received their baptism of fire, had not cried "Touché!" after the bursting of a German shell.

The theaters and music-halls of Paris opened one by one in the autumn of the first year of war. Some of the dancing girls and the singing girls found their old places behind the footlights, unless they had coughed their lungs away or grown too pinched and thin. But for a long time it was impossible to recapture the old spirit of these haunts, especially in the music-halls, where ghosts passed in the darkness of deserted promenoirs, and where a chill gave one goose-flesh in the empty stalls.

Paris was half ashamed to go to the Folies Bergères or the Renaissance, while away là-bas men were lying on the battlefields or crouching in the trenches. Only when the monotony of life without amusement became intolerable to people who have to laugh so that they may not weep, did they wend their way to these places for an hour or two. Even the actors and actresses and playwrights of Paris felt the grim presence of death not far away. The old Rabelaisianism was toned down to something like decency, and at least the grosser vulgarities of the musichall stage were banned by common consent.

The shadow of war crept through every keyhole in Paris and no man or woman shut up in a high attic with some idea or passion could keep out the evil genii which dominated the intellect and the imagination, and put its cold touch upon the senses, through that winter of agony when the best blood in France slopped into the water-logged trenches from Flanders to

the Argonne. Yet there were coteries in Paris which thrust the thing away from them as much as possible, and tried to pretend that art was still alive, and that philosophy was untouched by these brutalities.

I have written many words about the spirit of Paris in war. Yet all these little glimpses I have given reveal only the trivial characteristics of the city. Through all these episodes and outward facts, rising above them to a great height of spirituality, the soul of Paris was a white fire burning with a steady flame. I cannot describe the effect of it upon one's senses and imagination. I was only conscious of it, so that again and again, in the midst of the crowded boulevards, or in the dim aisles of Notre Dame, or wandering along the left bank of the Seine, I used to say to myself, silently or aloud: “These people are wonderful! . . . They hold the spirit of an unconquerable race. .... Nothing can smash this city of intellect, so gay, and yet so patient in suffering, so emotional and yet so stoic in pride and courage!" There was weakness, and vanity, in Paris. The war had not cleansed it of all its vice or of all its corruption, but this burning wind of love for La Patrie touched the heart of every man and woman, and inflamed them so that selfinterest was almost consumed, and sacrifice for the sake of France became a natural instinct. The ugliest old hag in the market shared this love with the most beautiful woman of the salons, the demi-mondaine with her rouged lips knelt in spirit, like Mary Magdalene, before the cross, and was glad to suffer for the sake of a pure uncarnal love, symbolized to her by the folds of the tricolor or by the magic of that word, “La France!" which thrilled her soul, smirched by the traffic of the streets. The most money-loving bourgeois, who had counted every sou and cheated every other one, was lifted out of his meanness and materialism and did astounding things, without a murmur, abandoning his business to go back to the colors as a soldier of France, and regarding the ruin of a life's ambitions without a heartache so that France might be free. There were embusqués in Paris-perhaps hundreds, or even thousands of young men who searched for soft jobs which would never take them to the firing line, or who pleaded illhealth with the successful influence of a family or political "pull." Let that be put down honestly, because nothing matters save the truth. But the manhood of Paris as a whole, after the first shudder of dismay, the first agonies of this

wrench from the safe, familiar ways of life, rose superbly to the call of la Patrie en danger! The middle-aged fathers of families and the younger sons marched away singing and hiding their sadness under a mask of careless mirth. The boys of eighteen followed them in the month of April, after nine months of war, and not a voice in Paris was raised to protest against this last and dreadful sacrifice. Paris cursed the stupidity of the war, cried "How long, O Lord, how long?" as it dragged on in its misery, with accumulating sums of death, was faint at the thought of another winter campaign, and groaned in spirit when its streets were filled with wounded men and black-garbed women. But though Paris suffered with the finer agonies of the sensitive intelligence, it did not lose faith or courage, and found the heart to laugh sometimes, in spite of all its tears.

BOMBARDMENT OF RHEIMS CATHEDRAL'

Rarely has an occurrence in the present war given our opponents so welcome an opportunity for charges, as groundless as they are venomous, as the bombardment of Rheims cathedral. Not only the French government, but also a considerable number of known and of anonymous writers have reproached Germany and, in spite of her many verifications to the contrary, upheld the charge that there was no military necessity for the bombardment which in their opinion was rather due to a mad lust of destruction. And yet as early as September 23, 1914, the German Army Command declared officially that the bombardment was caused and necessitated solely by the misuse of one of the cathedral towers as an observation tower. Our opponents may try to reason away that fact as much as they like; fact it will remain.

It is proved beyond all doubts that the French army command used the cathedral for a post of observation directly after our troops quitted the town. The French periodical, L'Illustration, stated on September 26, 1914, that an electric searchlight had been installed in the north tower of the cathedral on September 13, 1914. Abbé Thinot, maître de

1 Official statement issued by the German War Office at Berlin. This translation was furnished through the courtesy of Dr. K. A. Fuehr.