before the shops in the Rue de la Paix to gaze at the priceless jewellery
there, or stopping at a sidewalk cafe to enjoy a drink. Our soldiers had
not seen the front; many of them, no doubt, were on leave from the
training-camps, others were on duty in Paris, but all seemed in a hurry
to get somewhere, bound for a definite destination. They might have been
in New York or San Francisco. It was a novel sight, indeed, to observe
them striding across the Place Vendome with out so much as deigning to
cast a glance at the column dedicated to the great emperor who fought
that other world-war a century ago; to see our square-shouldered officers
hustling around corners in Ford and Packard automobiles. And the
atmosphere of our communication headquarters was so essentially one of
"getting things done" as to make one forget the mediaeval narrowness of
the Rue Sainte Anne, and the inconvenient French private-dwelling
arrangements of the house. You were transported back to America. Such,
too, was the air of our Red Cross establishment in the ancient building
facing the Palace de la Concorde, where the unfortunate Louis lost his
head.

History had been thrust into the background. I was never more aware of
this than when, shortly after dawn Wednesday, the massive grey pile of
the Palace of Versailles suddenly rose before me. As the motor shot
through the empty Place d'Armes I made a desperate attempt to summon
again a vivid impression, when I had first stood there many years ago,
of an angry Paris mob beating against that grill, of the Swiss guards
dying on the stairway for their Queen. But it was no use. France has
undergone some subtle change, yet I knew I was in France. I knew it when
we left Paris and sped through the dim leafy tunnels of the Bois; when I
beheld a touch of filtered sunlight on the dense blue thatch of the
'marroniers' behind the walls of a vast estate once dedicated to the
sports and pleasures of Kings; when I caught glimpses of silent chateaux