It was the general belief in Paris that many apaches were shot pour encourager les autres.  I cannot say that is true—­the police of Paris keep their own secrets—­but I believe a front place was found for some of them in the fighting lines.  Paris lost many of its rebels, who will never reappear in the Place Pigalle and the Avenue de Clichy on moonless nights.  Poor devils of misery!  They did but make war on the well-to-do, and with less deadly methods, as a rule, than those encouraged in greater wars when, for trade interests also, men kill each other with explosive bombs and wrap each other’s bowels round their bayonets and blow up whole companies of men in trenches which have been sapped so skilfully that at the word “Fire!” no pair of arms or legs remains to a single body and God Himself would not know His handiwork.

4

For several months there was a spy mania in Paris, and the police, acting under military orders, showed considerable activity in “Boche” hunting.  It was a form of chase which turned me a little sick when I saw the captured prey, just as I used to turn sick as a boy when I saw a rat caught in a trap and handed over to the dogs, or any other animal run to earth.  All my instincts made me hope for the escape of the poor beast, vermin though it might be.

One day as I was sitting in the Cafe Napolitain on one of my brief excursions to Paris from the turmoil in the wake of war, I heard shouts and saw a crowd of people rushing towards a motor-car coming down the Boulevard des Italiens.  One word was repeated with a long-drawn sibilance: 

“Espion!  Espion!”

The spy was between two agents de police.  He was bound with cords and his collar had been torn off, so that his neck was bare, like a man ready for the guillotine.  Somehow, the look of the man reminded me in a flash of those old scenes in the French Revolution, when a French aristocrat was taken in a tumbril through the streets of Paris.  He was a young man with a handsome, clear-cut face, and though he was very white except where a trickle of blood ran down his cheek from a gash on his forehead, he smiled disdainfully with a proud curl of the lip.  He knew he was going to his death, but he had taken the risk of that when he stayed in Paris for the sake of his country.  A German spy!  Yes, but a brave man who went rather well to his death through the sunlit streets of Paris, with the angry murmurs of a crowd rising in waves about him.

On the same night I saw another episode of this spy-hunting period, and it was more curious.  It happened in a famous restaurant not far from the Comedie Francaise, where a number of French soldiers in a variety of uniforms dined with their ladies before going to the front after a day’s leave from the fighting lines.  Suddenly, into the buzz of voices and above the tinkle of glasses and coffee-cups one voice spoke in a formal way, with clear, deliberate words.  I saw that it was the manager of the restaurant addressing his clients.