daily labor was done by them. The little cafe was full of men,--almost
every one in some sort of uniform,--drinking their coffee and scanning
the morning papers. Everybody in Paris seemed to read newspapers all
day long,--the cabmen as they drove, the passers-by as they walked
hastily on their errands, the waiters in the cafes,--and yet they
told so little of what was going on _la-bas!_.... The silence in the
restaurant seemed peculiarly dead. A gathering of Parisians no matter
where, as I remembered, was rarely silent, a French cafe never. But I
soon realized that one of the significant aspects of the new France
since the war was its taciturnity, its silence. Almost all faces were
gravely preoccupied with the national task, and whatever their own
small part in it might be, it was too serious a matter to encourage
chattering, gesticulating, or disputing in the pleasant Latin way.

Will the French ever recover wholly their habit of free, careless,
expressive speech? Of all the peoples under the trials of this war
they have become by general report the most sternly, grimly silent.
Compared with them the English, deemed by nature taciturn, have
become almost hysterically voluble. They complain, apologize, accuse,
recriminate. Each new manifestation of Teutonic strategy has evoked
from the English a flood of outraged comment. But from the beginning
the French have wasted no time on such _betise_ as they would call
it: they have put all their energies into their business, which as
every French creature knows is to fight this war through to a triumphant
end--and not talk. An extraordinary reversal of national temperaments
that! From the mobilization hour it was the same thing: every Frenchman
knew what it meant, the hour of supreme trial for his country, and he
went about his part in it with set face, without the beating of drums,
and he has kept that mood since. Henri Lavedan, in a little sketch of
the reunion between a _poilu_, on leave after nine months' absence in