understood their stake in the job, and accepted it.

The next day the army of midsummer travel was immobilized to let the
other army move. No more wild rushes to the station, no more bribing
of concierges, vain quests for invisible cabs, haggard hours of
waiting in the queue at Cook's. No train stirred except to carry
soldiers, and the civilians who had not bribed and jammed their way
into a cranny of the thronged carriages leaving the first night
could only creep back through the hot streets to their hotel and
wait. Back they went, disappointed yet half-relieved, to the
resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants,
motionless lifts: to the queer disjointed life of fashionable hotels
suddenly reduced to the intimacies and make-shift of a Latin
Quarter _pension._ Meanwhile it was strange to watch the gradual
paralysis of the city. As the motors, taxis, cabs and vans had
vanished from the streets, so the lively little steamers had left
the Seine. The canal-boats too were gone, or lay motionless: loading
and unloading had ceased. Every great architectural opening framed
an emptiness; all the endless avenues stretched away to desert
distances. In the parks and gardens no one raked the paths or
trimmed the borders. The fountains slept in their basins, the
worried sparrows fluttered unfed, and vague dogs, shaken out of
their daily habits, roamed unquietly, looking for familiar eyes.
Paris, so intensely conscious yet so strangely entranced, seemed to
have had _curare _injected into all her veins.

The next day--the 2nd of August--from the terrace of the Hotel
de Crillon one looked down on a first faint stir of returning life.
Now and then a taxi-cab or a private motor crossed the Place de la
Concorde, carrying soldiers to the stations. Other conscripts, in