Paris War Days Part 7

On the other hand, M. Millerand, Minister of War, has visited General Joffre at the army headquarters and returned to Paris to-night "very satisfied with the situation."

I took a spin in an automobile to-day to Versailles, and thence to Buc with its red brick aerodrome tower, sheds, and long rows of hangars. Here were groups of airmen in the rough, serviceable French sapper uniform-loose-fitting blue coat, blue trousers with a double red stripe, blue flannel scarf about their necks, as if they had all got sore throats, and blue pointed forage caps. Here is Chevillard, that wonderful gymnast of the air. There is Verrier, and here, driving a sporting-looking car, is Carpentier, whose more familiar costume is a pair of white slips and a pair of four-ounce gloves. For Carpentier has been mobilized, too. Instead of making thousands of dollars this month by his fight with Young Ahearn, and possibly other matches with Bombardier Wells and Gunboat Smith, he, too, is on the pay list of the army at next to nothing a day. He is attached to the flying center as a chauffeur, and that car he is driving is his own, only he cannot take it out without orders now.

[Photograph: etienne Alexandre Millerand, Minister of War, August 27, 1914.]

Morning and evening they fly at Buc. They are constantly testing new machines, and then, when they have tested them, they fly off to the army on the eastern frontier, or to Amiens, perhaps. The other day a pilot even flew to Antwerp right across the German lines over the heads of the German army, but so high up that they never even guessed he was there. Then they practise bomb-dropping, too, and they are always on the alert for a possible Zeppelin raid on Paris. The other night a wireless message reached the Eiffel Tower from the frontier that one had started. It was midnight, and instantly the alarm was given at Buc. The airmen sleep in the hangars there, and in five minutes they had their machines wheeled out.

By the light of lanterns you could see mechanics running to and fro. The airmen themselves were hurriedly putting on helmets and woollen gloves and leather coats, for it is cold work hunting airs.h.i.+ps at midnight. Their little armory of bombs was quickly overhauled, and the belt of the machine gun that the man in the pa.s.senger's seat uses-the "syringe" as they call it-was filled, and the engines were set running to see that they were all right. But it was a false alarm after all, for, although a close lookout was kept everywhere between Paris and the frontier for the adventurous Zeppelin, and a hundred guns were craning up into the sky ready for her if she hove in sight, she never came, and the tired airmen turned in again to s.n.a.t.c.h a little sleep before morning parade.

Constantly airmen fly off to the front. Those who have been there say that the supply trains and the whole service is working splendidly. They have organized a new sport among the air-scouts. Every day, at the end of the day's reconnoitring, the airmen count the bullet-holes in the wings and body of their machines. The aeroplane that has the most is the c.o.c.k machine of the squadrilla-six in the squadrilla-and holds the t.i.tle until some one gets a bigger peppering and displaces him. They are very jealous of this distinction, and the counting has to be very carefully carried out by an impartial jury, for the c.o.c.k aeroplane has the honor of carrying the mascot of the squadrilla.

Sat.u.r.day, August 29.

Twenty-seventh day of the war. Sultry weather, with light northerly breezes. Temperature at five P.M. 26 degrees centigrade.

"Hold tight!" Such is the watchword given by the French Government, and French and British soldiers are holding tight for all they are worth against the slowly advancing German armies. Heavy fighting all along the lines from the Somme to the Vosges continues without a break. The Prussian Guard Corps and the Tenth German Army Corps have been driven back to Guise, in the department of the Aisne (one hundred and ninety kilometers from Paris), but on the French left the Germans have fought their way to La Fere (northwest of Laon, about one hundred and forty kilometers from Paris). In the eastern theater of the war, Koenigsberg has been invested by the Russians under Rennenkampf, who continue their advance towards Berlin.

Paris begins to realize that the war is coming closer to them, by the following official announcement:

DEFENCES OF PARIS

_The Military Governor of Paris, in view of the urgent military requirements, has decided:

1. Within a delay of four full days, starting from August 30, all proprietors, occupants, and tenants of all descriptions of houses and buildings situated in the military zone of old and new forts must evacuate and demolish the aforesaid houses and buildings.

2. In the event of these instructions not being fulfilled within the prescribed delay, these houses and buildings will be immediately demolished by military authority and the materials taken away.

The Military Governor of Paris, Commander of the Armies of Paris.

(Signed)

GALLIENI._

General Pau, the gallant one-armed general who commands the French Army of the East, arrived in Paris at four o'clock this afternoon, but the reason for his visit is naturally kept secret. He had a conference at the Ministry of War with M. Millerand. He called for a few moments at his residence in the Boulevard Raspail. General Pau's son, a sub-lieutenant of infantry, is lying wounded at the hospital at Troyes. General Pau had an informal conversation with President Poincare at the Elysee Palace, and leaves again for the front to-morrow morning.

Refugees from Belgium and northern France continue to pour into Paris.

But the authorities, having had time to organize, are sending them on with very little delay to various places in the west and south of France.

It is impossible to prevent these frightened people from taking refuge in Paris, which they regard as a place of safety, and the only course open is to send them on as soon as possible.

Among the financial victims of the war are a number of Chinese students who have found their supplies of money from home suddenly cut off. A body of about sixty went to the Chinese Legation in the Rue de Babylone on Friday evening, and clamored for money.

The Minister, Mr. Liu s.h.i.+h-shen, was out but, to the great disgust of the staff, the students invaded the dining-room and kitchen and commandeered the dinner which was being prepared for the Minister.

A message was sent to his Excellency, who dined at a restaurant. Meanwhile the students, having dined, began to gamble, and several made preparations to spend the night in the Legation. They were, however, expelled by the police.

At the meeting of the women's auxiliary of the American Ambulance at the Emba.s.sy this afternoon, many details in connection with the establishment and maintenance of the hospital in the Lycee Pasteur were discussed.

A committee was appointed for the special purpose of supplying with clothing such wounded soldiers as may be brought to the hospital.

It was announced that Miss Matthews will succeed Miss Cameron as the chairman of the sewing committee, the latter having been called to America by her brother's illness.

Mrs. W.K. Vanderbilt has offered to contribute many articles needed in the installation of the hospital, particularly such things as window curtains and other furnis.h.i.+ngs designed to make the inst.i.tution as comfortable as possible for the sufferers.

For just four weeks now the American Government has been advancing money to citizens in need of it at the Emba.s.sy, and still the stream of applicants continues in about the same proportions as ever.

The undiminis.h.i.+ng demand for funds is due largely to the fact that there are new arrivals in the city every day, but Major Cosby, who is in charge of the distribution of the money, believes that with the departure of the Rochambeau and the Flandre there will come a gradually lessening demand for a.s.sistance.

So far about five hundred persons have received money, and the total paid out for the four weeks is 62,100 francs. This represents about one hundred and twenty-five francs, or twenty-five dollars, apiece.

In addition to the Government fund, which is paid only to persons who accept it as a loan, about twenty-seven thousand francs, raised here in Paris, has been given outright to persons who for various reasons could not be a.s.sisted out of the Government fund.

Captain Brinton has also paid out from sixty to seventy thousand dollars to various persons upon cable orders from the Department of State in Was.h.i.+ngton. This represents a purely business transaction, as the money has first been deposited with the Government by friends in the United States. It has, however, been an exceedingly practical means of helping persons who otherwise might have had to fall back on the relief funds.

Sunday, August 30.

Twenty-eighth day of the war. Sunny, but sultry, August Sunday. Light northerly breeze, thermometer at five P.M. 26 degrees centigrade.

No let-up in the fighting. The Germans continue with wonderful tenacity their favorite tactics of rolling up their forces on their right, and then enveloping and striving to turn the Anglo-French left. The French left, as officially announced at the War Office, has been forced to yield ground. But the result of the gigantic battle in the department of the Aisne near La Fere, Guise, and Laon, on the road to Paris, still hangs in the balance.

It seems pretty certain that the French armies were concentrated too far to the east. The temptation to enter Alsace, where strong force is needless, was too great for the then war minister, M. Messimy, to withstand. France is paying for this now. For over twenty years it was an open secret among military authorities that the main German attack upon France would burst in through Belgium and the northern departments of France, which seem to have been left without adequate fortifications. Here is France's vulnerable point. For France to be now outnumbered in this theater of the war is strong evidence of her also being out-generaled. While the French have wasted needless troops in futile excursions beyond the Vosges and in the Ardennes, they seem to have been blind to the tremendous concentration of German fighting strength in the north. Had it not been for the solid, heroic resistance of the British army under Field-marshal Sir John French, on the extreme French left at Mons and Cambrai, it is very likely that the French would have sustained a crus.h.i.+ng defeat. That the French should be outnumbered on the lines near La Fere seems incomprehensible and requires satisfactory explanation from the Ministry of War. Further proof of this primary fault is forthcoming in the proclamation issued to-day, calling to the colors the 1914 cla.s.s, some two hundred and fifty thousand young men of twenty, due to join the army in October. Moreover, those cla.s.ses of the reserves of the territorial army called up when the general mobilization order was issued and for some unaccountable reason actually sent home again, have also been recalled.

[Photograph: Copyright by American Press a.s.sociation. Parisians watching the German air-craft that drop bombs on the city.]

In broad daylight, at 1.15 this afternoon, the Germans left their first visiting-card in Paris. This came in the shape of three bombs dropped from a German aeroplane, that made a curved flight over the city at an alt.i.tude of two thousand meters. The first bomb fell at the corner of the Rue des Vinaigriers and the Rue du Marais, another in the Rue des Recollets, and a third near an asylum for aged workmen on the Quai Valmy. The airman also let fall an oriflamme, two and a half meters long, bearing the black and white Prussian colors, ballasted by sand in an india-rubber football, attached to which was a letter, written in German, which ran as follows: "The German Army is at the gates of Paris. The only thing left for you to do is to surrender! (Signed) LIEUTENANT VON HEIDSSEN."

The first bomb wounded two women, one of whom died of her injuries at the hospital shortly afterwards. She was concierge of the house Number 39 Rue des Vinaigriers. No other damage was done. There were thousands of Parisians promenading the streets at the time. The news spread like wild-fire, but no panic, nor even undue excitement, ensued; the people of Paris are totally different to-day from what they were in 1870. Of course the intention of these aeroplane bomb-throwers, of whose exploits we shall probably hear a great deal, was to create a panic and demoralize the inhabitants, and especially to terrify women and children. This utterly failed. After dropping the three bombs and his carte de visite, the German aeroplane vanished towards the east. It seems strange that the flotillas of air-craft at Buc were thus caught napping and allowed the German air-lieutenant to escape.

I called in the afternoon upon Madame Waddington and her sister, Miss King. Madame Waddington was anxious about her grandchildren, who are at their country place not far from Laon, where the battle is now raging. Madame Waddington says that Mr. Herrick, whom she saw this morning, told her that if worse came to the worst, the seat of government would probably be transferred to Bordeaux.

A large sum in gold coin, it is said, has been taken from the vaults of the Bank of France and sent to Rennes. Sharp comment is elicited by an incident at the Travellers Club, a somewhat select resort of Americans, English, and other foreigners, in the former hotel of the famous beauty of the Second Empire, Madame de Paiva, in the Champs-Elysees. It appears that a wealthy and prominent German by birth, but naturalized American, Mr. X., casually remarked one day at the club that he did not intend to trouble himself to get a permis de sejour (permission to reside in Paris), because "when the German troops arrived in the capital, these papers would no longer be needed." Mr. X. was told that if he persisted in expressing such views, offensive to the members of the club and to the hospitable city in which the club was situated, his resignation would be forthwith accepted by the house committee. Mr. X. paid no attention to the warning, but when next he entered the club-a few days after the incident-he was informed that his name had been stricken from the list of members.

M. Adrien Mithouard, President of the Munic.i.p.al Council, states that arrangements were made months ago to store a large quant.i.ty of flour in the city, so as to provide the civilian inhabitants with bread. This flour is in the hands of the military authorities, who have a considerably larger supply than was originally intended, and are still adding to it.

There will be no lack of coal. The army has acc.u.mulated enormous quant.i.ties, and the Gas Company has enough coal for five months. M. Mithouard also says he recently made a personal investigation of the water supply, and found that, even if the aqueducts were cut, the city would have two hundred and sixty thousand cubic meters of filtered water available every day from the Ivry and Saint-Maur waterworks; and even without these, Paris could still have two hundred and sixty thousand cubic meters a day chemically purified.

The Munic.i.p.al Council has also approved a proposal to buy up certain provisions to be added to the necessaries of life for the civilian population.

M. Georges Clemenceau, the "parliamentary tiger," who, although remaining outside the Cabinet, is one of the greatest personal forces of France, has made a stirring statement to Mr. Somerville Story, editor of the Daily Mail. M. Clemenceau said:

"Yes, their guns are almost within sound of Paris. And what if they are? What if we were yet to be defeated again and again? We should still go on. Let them burn Paris if they can. Let them wipe it out, raze it to the level of the ground. We shall still fight on.

"This is not my personal resolve alone. The Government, too, is just as grimly determined. Do you know, it is strange that one should have been able to come to feel like this, but the Germans could destroy all these beautiful places that I love so much; they may blow up the museums, overthrow monuments-it would only leave me still determined to fight on.

"France may disappear, if you like. It may be called Frankreich, if you like. We may be driven back to the very Pyrenees. It will not abate one fraction our vigor and our decision.

"And in this terrible war we must all realize how unutterably great are the stakes. It is we in France and our friends in Belgium who are doomed to suffer the most bitterly. England will be spared much that we must endure. But we must all make sacrifices almost beyond reckoning. We are fighting for the dignity of humanity. We are fighting for the right of civilization to continue to exist. We are fighting so that nations may continue to live in Europe without being under the heel of another nation. It is a great cause; it is worthy of great sacrifices.

"I say this to convince you of the unbreakable spirit of the French nation.