One Sunday afternoon, just before I came away, I went down into the island of the old city, the original Paris, to say good-by to certain beautiful things I love. It was a lovely spring day and the quay of flowers and the Palace quay were crowded with Parisians out for a Sunday walk. The women wore their spring finery, and there were many little girls in shining white dresses and veils of their first communion. The long-distance gun had been silent for about forty hours. It gets out of order easily, or else the allied airmen had been shelling it. Anyhow, it had been silent. But suddenly, about fifty yards from where I stood, the waters of the Seine shot up in a great waterspout, there was an explosion and the usual BOOM. A shell had skimmed over the heads of that Sunday crowd of inoffensive Parisians and landed in the river. In a minute the surface of the water was sprinkled with dead fish. Of course, the object of this bombardment is to frighten and discourage the French. Let me tell you how far it falls short of its object. The cables no doubt carried the story of one shot from that long-distance gun that struck a maternity hospital, killing in their beds mothers and new-born babies. A nurse was killed also, and many women were wounded. The hospital ward itself was reduced to matchwood. It was a horrible thing. In the midst of all this horror, and as a result of it, a young woman was prematurely delivered of a child, a little girl. The mother died, but the little baby girl lived, and the nurses called in a priest and had that baby christened Victory. One day, through the streets of Paris they were hauling a captured German cannon, one of the number which now reposes in the courtyard of the Hotel des Invalides. The people stopped to watch the cannon go by, but there was no demonstration of hatred. The French respect an honorable foe; it is only unclean warfare that they scorn. This was demonstrated right then and there, for as the cannon passed on “Big Bertha,” as they call the long-distance gun, suddenly spoke, and somewhere a shell fell in Paris. A workman in a white smock raised his fist and bawled out in the direction of the German frontier: “That’s right, bark, you cur. This one can no longer bite!” CHAPTER XXI THE REPATRIATES Evian-les-Bains is a charming little French town situated near the Swiss frontier. Before the war Evian was a health resort, rivaling Aix-les-Bains, farther south, in its stimulating climate and its medicinal baths. It was a place where the rich and the comfortably circumstanced of almost every country in Europe went to regain lost health. Now it is a place where some of the most miserable people in all the world may be seen. For Evian is the place where Germany returns to France those French men, women and children who are no longer of any use as prisoners and slaves.