existence, though they were much in demand. And in spite of the soldiers
thronging the sunlit streets, Paris was seemingly the same Paris one had
always known, gay--insouciante, pleasure-bent. The luxury shops appeared
to be thriving, the world-renowned restaurants to be doing business as
usual; to judge from the prices, a little better than usual; the
expensive hotels were full. It is not the real France, of course, yet it
seemed none the less surprising that it should still exist. Oddly enough
the presence of such overwhelming numbers of soldiers should have failed
to strike the note of war, emphasized that of lavishness, of the casting
off of mundane troubles for which the French capital has so long been
known. But so it was. Most of these soldiers were here precisely with
the object of banishing from their minds the degradations and horrors of
the region from which they had come, and which was so unbelievably near;
a few hours in an automobile--less than that in one of those dragon-fly
machines we saw intermittently hovering in the blue above our heads!

Paris, to most Americans, means that concentrated little district de luxe
of which the Place Vendome is the centre, and we had always unconsciously
thought of it as in the possession of the Anglo-Saxons. So it seems
today. One saw hundreds of French soldiers, of course, in all sorts of
uniforms, from the new grey blue and visor to the traditional cloth
blouse and kepi; once in a while a smart French officer. The English and
Canadians, the Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans were much in
evidence. Set them down anywhere on the face of the globe, under any
conditions conceivable, and you could not surprise them; such was the
impression. The British officers and even the British Tommies were
blase, wearing the air of the 'semaine Anglaise', and the "five o'clock
tea," as the French delight to call it. That these could have come
direct from the purgatory of the trenches seemed unbelievable. The
Anzacs, with looped-up hats, strolled about, enjoying themselves, halting