Dawn, early September dawn, on dew-moist fields, where the harvests lay unfinished as the workers, hastening to the call of war, had left the work. Across Paris, which seemed as silent as the fields, to a hotel with empty rooms! Five hundred empty rooms, with a clock ticking busily in every room! War or no war, that old man who wound the clocks was making his rounds softly through the halls from door to door. He was a good soldier, who had heeded Joffre’s request that every one should go on with his day’s work. “They’re done!” said an American in the foyer. “The French could not stand up against the Germans--anybody anybody could see that! It’s too bad, but the French are licked. The Germans will be here to-morrow or the next day.” I could not and would not believe it. Such a disaster was against all one’s belief in the French army and in the real character of the French people. It meant that autocracy was making sport of democracy; it meant disaster to all one’s precepts; a personal disaster. “Look at that interior line which the French now hold. Think of the power of the defensive with modern arms. No! The French have not had their battle yet!” I said. And the British Expeditionary Force was still intact; still an army, with lots of fight left in it. IV PARIS WAITS The Paris of the boulevards a dead city--How Marianne goes to war-- The Germans are coming!--Silence and darkness--Moonlight on the Arc de Triomphe--Trust in Joffre and in the army--Turn of the tide--Joffre’s _communiqués_ more definite--Positions regained--The French in pursuit--Paris breathes again--A Sunday of relief--Religious rejoicing at Nôtre Dame--Groups in the cafés--The American Embassy “mobilised for war”--“In spite of ’70, France still lived.” It was then that people were speaking of Paris as a dead city--a Paris without theatres, without young men, without omnibuses, with the shutters of its shops down and its cafés and restaurants in gloomy emptiness. The Paris the host of the idler and the traveller, the Paris of the boulevards and the night life provided for the tourist, the Paris that sparkled and smiled in entertainment, the Paris exploited to the average American through Sunday supplements and the reminiscences of smoking-rooms of transatlantic liners, was dead. Those who knew no other Paris and conjectured no other Paris departed as from the tomb of the pleasures which had been the passing extravaganza of relief from dull lives elsewhere. The Parisienne of that Paris spent a thousand francs to get her pet dog safely away to Marseilles. Politicians of a craven type, who are the curse of all democracies, had gone to keep her company, leaving Paris cleaner than ever she was after the streets had had their morning bath on a spring day when the horse chestnuts were in bloom and Madame was arranging her early editions on the table of her kiosk--a spiritually clean Paris.