At the beginning of the battle of the Marne a few regiments were still in Paris. The Military Governor, General Galliéni, was instructed to rush them north by any means available. The northern railways were in German hands, and the only way was to send them in taxicabs. So many chauffeurs had been mobilized that Paris had then probably not more than two thousand taxis. At the tightest squeeze not more than four soldiers with heavy marching equipment, could have been carried in one of the small Paris taxicabs. The taxicab army, therefore, may have numbered four regiments, or eight thousand men, while the real figures may possibly be less. It was not the army of Paris gallantly rushing out to save the city. The army of Paris had instructions to remain in the city and to defend it. The taxicab army was a fine and dramatic piece of news, expanded to fit the imagination of an excited world. The fable factory actually began operations before the declaration of war, when with the sudden shortage of money, tales of starving and otherwise suffering American tourists were cabled to New York by the yellow press. But the Paris papers, and the general press, awaited mobilization orders before becoming graphic without the support of facts. On the first day of hostilities several papers printed thrilling details of the airman Garros having brought down a Zeppelin. Garros was then waiting for military orders at his Paris apartment and laughed heartily at the story when I telephoned to him. Four times during the first month of the war I read of the death of the airman Vedrines. Six months later I met him on one of my trips to the front. The death of Max Linder, the comedian, was also dramatically related by the Paris press, but a few nights later I found Linder on the _terrasse_ of a boulevard café relating his very live adventure in getting there. Leaving out of consideration the feelings of the men's families these were after all comparatively harmless and unimportant fakes. A more sinister story, hinted at for weeks and finally openly printed, was that a certain French general had been shot for treachery while stationed near the Belgian frontier. So persistent was this report that it was finally necessary for General Joffre himself to issue a statement that the general in question was alive and well and had merely been removed to another field of active service.