The Soul of the War Part 27

There were other noises rising from the streets of Paris. Whistles were blowing, very faintly, in far places. Firemen's bells were ringing, persistently.

"L'alerte!" said the man. "The Zeppelins are coming!"

The lamp at the street corner was suddenly extinguished, leaving absolute darkness.

"Fermez vos rideaux!" shouted a hoa.r.s.e voice.

Footsteps went hurriedly down the pavement and then were silent.

"It is nothing!" said the woman; "a false alarm!" "Listen!"

Paris was very quiet now. The bugle-notes were as faint as far-off bells against the wind. But there was no wind, and the air was still. It was still except for a peculiar vibration, a low humming note, like a great bee booming over clover fields. It became louder and the vibration quickened, and the note was like the deep stop of an organ.

Tremendously sustained was the voice of a great engine up in the sky, invisible. Lights were searching for it now. Great rays, like immense white arms, stretched across the sky, trying to catch that flying thing. They crossed each other, flying backwards and forwards, travelled softly and cautiously across the dark vault as though groping through every inch of it for that invisible danger. The sound of guns shocked into the silence, with dull reports. From somewhere in Paris a flame shot up, revealing in a quick flash groups of shadow figures at open windows and on flat roofs.

"Look!" said the man who had a view across the Boulevard St.

Germain.

The woman drew a deep breath.

"Yes, there is one of them! ... And another! ... How fast they travel!"

There was a black smudge in the sky, blacker than the darkness. It moved at a great rate, and the loud vibrations followed it. For a moment or two, touched by one of the long rays of light it was revealed--a death-s.h.i.+p, white from stem to stern and crossing the sky like a streak of lightning. It went into the darkness again and its pa.s.sage could only be seen now by some little flames which seemed to fall from it. They went out like French matches, sputtering before they died.

In all parts of Paris there were thousands of people watching the apparition in the sky. On the heights of the Sacre C?ur inhabitants of Montmartre gathered and thrilled to the flas.h.i.+ng of the searchlights and the bursting of shrapnel.

The bugle-calls bidding everybody stay indoors had brought Paris out of bed and out of doors. The most bad-tempered people in the city were those who had slept through the alerte, and in the morning received the news with an incredulous "Quoi? Non, ce n'est pas possible! Les Zeppelins sont venus? Je n'ai pas entendu le moindre bruit!"

Some houses were smashed in the outer suburbs. A few people had been wounded in their beds. Unexploded bombs were found in gardens and rubbish heaps. After all, the Zeppelin raid had been a grotesque failure in the fine art of murder, and the casualty list was so light that Paris jeered at the death-s.h.i.+ps which had come in the night.

Count Zeppelin was still the same old blagueur. His precious airs.h.i.+ps were ridiculous.

A note of criticism crept into the newspapers and escaped the censor. Where were the French aviators who had sworn to guard Paris from such a raid? There were unpleasant rumours that these adventurous young gentlemen had taken the night off with the ladies of their hearts. It was stated that the telephone operator who ought to have sent the warning to them was also making la bombe, or sleeping away from his post. It was beyond a doubt that certain well- known aviators had been seen in Paris restaurants until closing time... Criticism was killed by an official denial from General Galieni, who defended those young gentlemen under his orders, and affirmed that each man was at the post of duty. It was a denial which caused the scandalmongers to smile as inscrutably as Mona Lisa.

13

The shadow of war crept through every keyhole in Paris, and no man or woman shut up in a high attic with some idea or pa.s.sion could keep out the evil genii which dominated the intellect and the imagination, and put its cold touch upon the senses, through that winter of agony when the best blood in France slopped into the waterlogged trenches from Flanders to the Argonne. Yet there were coteries in Paris which thrust the Thing away from them as much as possible, and tried to pretend that art was still alive, and that philosophy was untouched by these brutalities. In the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts and other boites where men of ideas pander to the baser appet.i.tes for 1 franc 50 (vin compris), old artists, old actors, sculptors whose beards seemed powdered with the dust of their ateliers, and litterateurs who will write you a sonnet or an epitaph, a wedding speech, or a political manifesto in the finest style of French poesy and prose (a little archaic in expression) a.s.sembled nightly just as in the days of peace. Some of the youngest faces who used to be grouped about the tables had gone, and now and then there was silence for a second as one of the habitues would raise his gla.s.s to the memory of a soldier of France (called to the colours on that fatal day in August) who had fallen on the Field of Honour. The ghost of war stalked even into the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts, but his presence was ignored as much as might be by these long-haired Bohemians with grease- stained clothes and unwashed hands who discussed the spirit of Greek beauty, the essential viciousness of women, the vulgarity of the bourgeoisie, the prose of Anatole France, the humour of Rabelais and his successors, and other eternal controversies with a pretext of their old fire. If the theme of war slipped in it was discussed with an intellectual contempt, and loose-lipped old men found a frightful mirth in the cut-throat exploits of Moroccans and Senegalese, in the b.e.s.t.i.a.l orgies of drunken Boches, and in the most revolting horrors of bayonet charges and the corps-a-corps. It was as though they wanted to reveal the savagery of war to the last indescribable madness of its l.u.s.t. "Pah!" said an old cabotin, after one of these word-pictures. "This war is the last spasm of the world's barbarity.

Human nature will finish with it this time. . . . Let us talk of the women we have loved. I knew a splendid creature once--she had golden hair, I remember--"

One of these shabby old gentlemen touched me on the arm.

"Would Monsieur care to have a little music? It is quite close here, and very beautiful. It helps one to forget the war, and all its misery."

I accepted the invitation. I was more thirsty for music than for vin ordinaire or cordiale Medoc. Yet I did not expect very much round the corner of a restaurant frequented by shabby intellectuals... That was my English stupidity.

A little group of us went through a dark courtyard lit by a high dim lantern, touching a sculptured figure in a far recess.

"Pas de bruit," whispered a voice through the gloom.

Up four flights of wooden stairs we came to the door of a flat which was opened by a bearded man holding a lamp.

"Soyez les bienvenus!" he said, with a strongly foreign accent.

It was queer, the contrast between the beauty of his salon into which we went and the crudeness of the restaurant from which we had come. It was a long room, with black wall-paper, and at the far end of it was a shaded lamp on a grand piano. There was no other light, and the faces of the people in the room, the head of a Greek G.o.d on a pedestal, some little sculptured figures on an oak table, and some portrait studies on the walls, were dim and vague until my eyes became accustomed to this yellowish twilight. No word was spoken as we entered, and took a chair if we could find one. None of the company here seemed surprised at this entry of strangers--for two of us were that--or even conscious of it. A tall, clean-shaven young man with a fine, grave face--certainly not French--was playing the violin, superbly; I could not see the man at the piano who touched the keys with such tenderness. Opposite me was another young man, with the curly hair and long, thin face of a Greek faun nursing a violoncello, and listening with a dream in his eyes. A woman with the beauty of some northern race sat in an oak chair with carved arms, which she clasped tightly. I saw the sparkle of a ring on her right hand. The stone had caught a ray from the lamp and was alive with light. Other people with strange, interesting faces were grouped about this salon, absorbed in that music of the violin, which played something of spring, so lightly, so delicately, that our spirit danced to it, and joy came into one's senses as on a sunlit day, when the wind is playing above fields of flowers. Afterwards the cellist drew long, deep chords from his great instrument, and his thin fingers quivered against the thick strings, and made them sing grandly and n.o.bly. Then the man at the piano played alone, after five minutes of silence, in which a few words were spoken, about some theme which would work out with strange effects.

"I will try it," said the pianist. "It amuses me to improvise. If it would not worry you--"

It was not wearisome. He played with a master-touch, and the room was filled with rus.h.i.+ng notes and cras.h.i.+ng harmonies. For a little time I could not guess the meaning of their theme. Then suddenly I was aware of it. It was the tramp of arms, the roar of battle, the song of victory and of death. Wailing voices came across fields of darkness, and then, with the dawn, birds sang, while the dead lay still.

The musician gave a queer laugh. "Any good?"

"C'est la guerre!" said a girl by my side. She s.h.i.+vered a little.

They were Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes in that room, with a few Parisians among them. Students to whom all life is expressed in music, they went on with their work in spite of the war. But war had touched their spirit too, with its great tragedy, and found expression in their art. It was but one glimpse behind the scenes of Paris, in time of war, and in thousands of other rooms, whose window-curtains were drawn to veil their light from hostile aircraft, the people who come to Paris as the great university of intellect and emotion, continued their studies and their way of life, with vibrations of fiddle-strings and sc.r.a.ping of palettes and adventures among books.

Even the artists' clubs had not all closed their doors, though so many young painters were mixing blood with mud and watching impressionistic pictures of ruined villages through the smoke of sh.e.l.ls.

Through cigarette smoke I gazed at the oddest crowd in one of these clubs off the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Slavs with matted hair, American girls in Futurist frocks, Italians like figures out of pre- Raphaelite frescoes, men with monkey faces and monkey manners, men with the faces of mediaeval saints a little debauched by devilish temptations, filled the long bare room, spoke in strange tongues to each other, and made love pa.s.sionately in the universal language and in dark corners provided with ragged divans. A dwarf creature perched on a piano stool teased the keys of an untuned piano and drew forth adorable melody, skipping the broken notes with great agility. ... It was the same old Paris, even in time of war.

14

The artists of neutral countries who still kept to their lodgings in the Quartier Latin and fanned the little flame of inspiration which kept them warm though fuel is dear, could not get any publicity for their works. There was no autumn or spring salon in the Palais des Beaux- Arts, where every year till war came one might watch the progress of French art according to the latest impulse of the time stirring the emotions of men and women who claim the fullest liberties even for their foolishness. War had killed the Cubists, and many of the Futurists had gone to the front to see the odd effects of scarlet blood on green gra.s.s. The Grand Palais was closed to the public. Yet there were war pictures here, behind closed doors, and sculpture stranger than anything conceived by Marinetti. I went to see the show, and when I came out again into the sunlight of the gardens, I felt very cold, and there was a queer trembling in my limbs.

The living pictures and the moving statuary in the Grand Palais exhibited the fine arts of war as they are practised by civilized men using explosive sh.e.l.ls, with bombs, shrapnel, hand-grenades, mitrailleuses, trench-mines, and other ingenious instruments by which the ordinary designs of G.o.d may be re-drawn and re-shaped to suit the modern tastes of men. I saw here the Spring Exhibition of the Great War, as it is catalogued by surgeons, doctors, and scientific experts in wounds and nerve diseases.

It was not a pretty sight, and the only thing that redeemed its ugliness was the way in which all those medical men were devoting themselves to the almost hopeless task of untwisting the contorted limbs of those victims of the war spirit, and restoring the shape of man botched by the artists of the death machines.

In the Great Hall through which in the days of peace pretty women used to wander with raised eyebrows and little cries of "Ciel!" (even French women revolted against the most advanced among the Futurists), there was a number of extraordinary contrivances of a mechanical kind which shocked one's imagination, and they were being used by French soldiers in various uniforms and of various grades, with twisted limbs, and paralytic gestures. One young man, who might have been a cavalry officer, was riding a queer bicycle which never moved off its pedestal, though its wheels revolved to the efforts of its rider. He pedalled earnestly and industriously, though obviously his legs had stiffened muscles, so that every movement gave him pain. Another man, "bearded like the bard," sat with his back to the wall clutching at two rings suspended from a machine and connected with two weights. Monotonously and with utterly expressionless eyes, he raised and lowered his arms a few inches or so, in order to bring back their vitality, which had been destroyed by a nervous shock. Many wheels were turning in that great room and men were strapped to them, as though in some torture chamber, devilishly contrived. In this place, however, the work was to defeat the cruelties of War the Torturer, after it had done its worst with human flesh.

The worst was in other rooms, where poor wrecks of men lay face downwards in hot-air boxes, where they stayed immovable and silent as though in their coffins, or with half their bodies submerged in electrolysed baths. Nurses were ma.s.saging limbs which had been maimed and smashed by sh.e.l.l-fire, and working with fine and delicate patience at the rigid fingers of soldiers, some of whom had lost their other arms, so that unless they could use their last remaining fingers, three or four to a hand, they would be useless for any work in the world. But most pitiable of all were the long rows of the paralysed and the blind, who lay in the hospital ward, motionless and sightless, with smashed faces. In the Palace of Fine Arts this statuary might have made the stones weep.

15

At last the spring song sounded through the streets of Paris with a pagan joy.

There was a blue sky over the city--so clear and cloudless that if any Zeppelin came before the night, it would have been seen a mile high, as a silver s.h.i.+p, translucent from stem to stern, sailing in an azure sea. One would not be scared by one of these death-s.h.i.+ps on such a day as this, nor believe, until the crash came, that it would drop down destruction upon this dream city, all aglitter in gold and white, with all its towers and spires clean-cut against the sky.

It was hard to think of death and war; because spring had come with its promise of life. There was a thrill of new vitality throughout the city. I seemed to hear the sap rising in the trees along the boulevards.

Or was it only the wind plucking at invisible harp-strings, or visible telephone wires, and playing the spring song in Parisian ears?

In the Tuileries gardens, glancing aslant the trees, I saw the first green of the year, as the buds were burgeoning and breaking into tiny leaves. The white statues of G.o.ddesses--a little crumbled and weather-stained after the winter--were bathed in a pale suns.h.i.+ne.

Psyche stretched out her arms, still half-asleep, but waking at the call of spring. Pomona offered her fruit to a young student, who gazed at her with his black hat pushed to the back of his pale forehead.

Womanhood, with all her beauty carved in stone, in laughing and tragic moods, in the first grace of girlhood, and in full maturity, stood poised here in the gardens of the Tuileries, and seemed alive and vibrant with this new thrill of life which was pulsing in the moist earth and whispering through the trees, because spring had come to Paris.