and boiling with people, Parisians, belated American tourists, refugees
from northeast villages, going somewhere, anywhere, to get away. It was
September 2.

There were miles of closed shops with placards on the shutters:
"Proprietor and personnel have been called to the colors"; no buses or
trams, the few 'cabs piled with the luggage of those trying to get away,
almost no way to traverse the splendid distances but to walk. Papers
could not be cried aloud on the streets, and the only news was the
official communiqué and a word about some Servian or Russian victory in
some un-pronounceable region of the East.

"France is a history, a life, an idea which has taken its place in the
world, and the bit of earth from which that history, that life, that
thought, has radiated, we cannot sacrifice without sealing the stone of
the tomb over ourselves and our children and the generations to follow
us." Thus George Clemenceau was writing in L'Homme Libre, and people
knew that this was true. And yet in that ghastly silence of Paris,
broken only by the constant flight of military automobiles, screaming
through the streets on missions nobody understood, those left behind did
not even know where the enemy was, where the defenders were, or what was
being done to save Paris. And it gradually, and not unnaturally, seemed
to the more nervous that nothing had been done--the forts were paper,
the government faithless, revolution imminent--one heard the wildest
things.

Late that afternoon I walked down from the Madeleine toward the river.
It was the "hour of the aperitif"--there were still enough people to
fill cafe tables--and since Sunday it had been the hour of the German
aeroplane. It had come that afternoon, dropped a few bombs--"quelques