Even at its busiest hours Paris gave a peculiar sense of emptiness, hard to account for when all about men and women and vehicles were moving, when it was best to look carefully before crossing the streets. It could not be due wholly to the absence of men and the diminution of business--there was at least half of the ordinary volume of movement. Nor was it altogether a cessation of that soft roar of traffic which ordinarily enveloped Paris day and night. It was not exactly like Paris on Sunday--except in the rue de la Paix--as I remembered Paris Sundays. No, it was something quite new--the physical expression of that inner silence, of that tenacity of mute will which I read in all the faces that passed me. Paris was living within, or beyond--_là-bas_, all along those hundreds of miles of earth walls from Flanders to the Vosges, where for nine months their men had faced the invader. Most of the women one met were in black, almost every one wearing some sort of mourning, for there was scarcely a family in France that had not already paid its toll of life, many several times over. But the faces of these women in black were calm and dry-eyed: there were few outward signs of grief other than the mourning clothes, just an enduring silence. "The time for our mourning is not yet," a Frenchman said whose immediate family circle had given seven of its members. With some, one felt, the time for weeping would never come: they had transmuted their personal woe into devotion to others.... There was little loitering and gazing in at shop windows, few shoppers in the empty stores these days. Everybody seemed to have something important that must be done at once and had best be done in sober silence. Even the wounded had lost the habit of telling their troubles. Doctors and nurses related as one of the interesting phenomena in the hospitals this dislike of talking about what they had been through, even among the common soldiers. Most likely their experiences had been too horrible for gossip. There was a conspiracy of silence, a tacit recognition of the futility of words, and almost never a complaint! One day a soldier walked a block to give me a direction, and in reply to my inquiry pointed to his lower jaw where a deep wound was hidden in a thick beard. "A ball," he said simply. It was the second wound he had received, and that night he was going back to his _dépôt_. For they went back again and again into that hell so close to this peaceful Paris, and what happened there was too bad for words. It must be endured in silence.