you claiming more happiness for the masses!  I wonder.  There is no actual buying and selling in open slave markets, it is true, but the men who built the Pyramids and dragged the stone for Hadrian’s Villa, were they any worse off really than the workers in the mines today?  Upon my soul, I don’t know.  Life is only a span between the Unknown and the Unknowable.  Living is made up in all centuries of just so many emotions.  We have never, so far as I know, invented any new one.  It is too bad to throw these things at you on paper which can’t answer back as you would, and right sharply I know.

Nothing going on here except the passing now and then of a long line of Paris street busses on the way to the front.  They are all mobilized and going as heroically to the front as if they were human, and going to get smashed up just the same.  It does give me a queer sensation to see them climbing this hill.  The little Montmartre-Saint-Pierre bus, that climbs up the hill to the funicular in front of Sacre-Coeur, came up the hill bravely.  It was built to climb a hill.  But the Bastille-Madeleine and the Ternes-Fille de Calvaine, and Saint-Sulpice-Villette just groaned and panted and had to have their traction changed every few steps.  I thought they would never get up, but they did.

Another day it was the automobile delivery wagons of the Louvre, the Bon Marche, the Printemps, Petit-Saint-Thomas, La Belle Jardiniere, Potin—­all the automobiles with which you are so familiar in the streets of Paris.  Of course those are much lighter, and came up bravely.  As a rule they are all loaded.  It is as easy to take men to the front, and material, that way as by railroad, since the cars go.  Only once have I seen any attempt at pleasantry on these occasions.  One procession went out the other day with all sorts of funny inscriptions, some not at all pretty, many blackguarding the Kaiser, and of course one with the inevitable “A Berlin” the first battle-cry of 1870.  This time there has been very little of that.  I confess it gave me a kind of shiver to see “A Berlin—­pour notre plaisir” all over the bus.  “On to Berlin!” I don’t see that that can be hoped for unless the Germans are beaten to a finish on the Rhine and the allied armies cross Germany as conquerors, unopposed.  If they only could!  It would only be what is due to Belgium that King Albert should lead the procession “Under the Lindens.”  But I doubt if the maddest war optimist hopes for anything so well deserved as that.  I don’t dare to, sure as I am of seeing Germany beaten to her knees before the war is closed.

XI

September 8, 1914.

Oh, the things I have seen and felt since I last wrote to you over two weeks ago.  Here I am again cut off from the world, and have been since the first of the month.  For a week now I have known nothing of what was going on in the world outside the limits of my own vision.  For that matter, since the Germans crossed the frontier our news of the war has been meager.  We got the calm, constant reiteration—­“Left wing—­held by the English—­forced to retreat a little.”  All the same, the general impression was, that in spite of that, “all was well.”  I suppose it was wise.