When the long train from Switzerland pulled into the station there were enough old men and boys to take the travelers' bags, which is not always the case these war times when every sort of worker has much more than two hands can do. There were men waiters in the station restaurant where I took my morning coffee. It is odd how quickly one scanned these protected workers with the instinctive question--"Why are you too not fighting for your country?" But if not old or decrepit, it was safe to say that these civilian workers were either women or foreigners--Greeks, Balkans, or Spanish, attracted to Paris by opportunities for employment. For the entire French nation was practically mobilized, including women and children, so much of the daily labor was done by them. The little café 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 cafés,--and yet they told so little of what was going on _là-bas!_.... The silence in the restaurant seemed peculiarly dead. A gathering of Parisians no matter where, as I remembered, was rarely silent, a French café 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.