“France is a history, a life, an idea which has taken its place in the world, and the bit of earth from which that history, that life, that thought, has radiated, we cannot sacrifice without sealing the stone of the tomb over ourselves and our children and the generations to follow us.”  Thus George Clemenceau was writing in L’Homme Libre, and people knew that this was true.  And yet in that ghastly silence of Paris, broken only by the constant flight of military automobiles, screaming through the streets on missions nobody understood, those left behind did not even know where the enemy was, where the defenders were, or what was being done to save Paris.  And it gradually, and not unnaturally, seemed to the more nervous that nothing had been done—­the forts were paper, the government faithless, revolution imminent—­one heard the wildest things.

Late that afternoon I walked down from the Madeleine toward the river.  It was the “hour of the aperitif”—­there were still enough people to fill cafe tables—­and since Sunday it had been the hour of the German aeroplane.  It had come that afternoon, dropped a few bombs—­“quelques ordures”—­and sailed away to return next day at the same hour.  “You have remarked,” explained one of the papers, “that people who are without wit always repeat their jokes.”  And just as I came into the Place de la Concorde, “Mr. Taube” came up out of the north.

You must imagine that vast open space, with the bridge and river and Invalides behind it, and beyond the light tracery of the Eiffel Tower, covered with little specks of people, all looking upward.  Back along the boulevards, on roofs on both banks, all Paris, in fact, was similarly staring—­“Le nez en l’air.”  And straight overhead, so far up that even the murmur of the motor was unheard, no more than a bird, indeed, against the pale sky, “Mr. Taube,” circling indolently about, picking his moment, plotting our death.

I thought of the shudder of outraged horror that ran over Antwerp when the first Zeppelin came.  It seemed the last unnecessary blow to a heroic people who had already stood so much.  Very different was “Mr. Taube’s” reception here.  He might have been a holiday balloon or some particularly fancy piece of fireworks.  Everywhere people were staring upward, looking through their closed fists, through opera-glasses.  Out of the arcades of the Hotel de Crillon one man in a bath-robe and another in a suit of purple underclothes came running, to gaze calmly into the zenith until the “von” had gone.

As the little speck drew straight overhead, these human specks scattered over the Place de la Concorde suddenly realized that they were in the line of fire, and scattered just as people run from a sudden shower.  This was the most interesting thing—­these helpless little humans scrambling away like ants or beetles to shelter, and that tiny insolent bird sailing slowly far overhead.  This was a bit of the modern