“Ulloh...  Engleesh boy?  Ahlright, eh?” The butterfly girls hovered about them, spread their wings before those young officers from the front and those knights of the Red Cross, tempted them with all their wiles, and led them, too many of them, to their mistress Circe, who put her spell upon them.

At every turn in the street, or under the trees of Paris, some queer little episode, some startling figure from the great drama of the war arrested the interest of a wondering spectator.  A glimpse of tragedy made one’s soul shudder between two smiles at the comedy of life.  Tears and laughter chased each other through Paris in this time of war.

“Coupe gorge, comme ca.  Sale boche, mort.  Sa tete, voyez.  Tombe a terre.  Sang!  Mains, en bain de sang.  Comme ca!”

So the Turco spoke under the statue of Aphrodite in the gardens of the Tuileries to a crowd of smiling men and girls.  He had a German officer’s helmet.  He described with vivid and disgusting gestures how he had cut off the man’s head—­he clicked his tongue to give the sound of it—­and how he had bathed his hands in the blood of his enemy, before carrying this trophy to his trench.  He held out his hands, staring at them, laughing at them as though they were still crimson with German blood. ...  A Frenchwoman shivered a little and turned pale.  But another woman laughed—­an old creature with toothless gums—­with a shrill, harsh note.

“Sale race!” she said; “a dirty race!  I should be glad to cut a German throat!”

Outside the Invalides, motor-cars were always arriving at the headquarters of General Galieni.  French staff officers came at full speed, with long shrieks on their motor-horns, and little crowds gathered round the cars to question the drivers.

“Ca marche, la guerre?  Il y a du progres?”

British officers came also, with dispatches from headquarters, and two soldiers with loaded rifles in the back seats of cars that had been riddled with bullets and pock-marked with shrapnel.

Two of these men told their tale to me.  They had left the trenches the previous night to come on a special mission to Paris, and they seemed to me like men who had been in some torture chamber and suffered unforgettable and nameless horrors.  Splashed with mud, their faces powdered with a greyish clay and chilled to the bone by the sharp shrewd wind of their night near Soissons and the motor journey to Paris, they could hardly stand, and trembled and spoke with chattering teeth.

“I wouldn’t have missed it,” said one of them, “but I don’t want to go through it again.  It’s absolutely infernal in those trenches, and the enemy’s shell-fire breaks one’s nerves.”

They were not ashamed to confess the terror that still shook them, and wondered, like children, at the luck—­the miracle of luck—­which had summoned them from their place in the firing-line to be the escort of an officer to Paris, with safe seats in his motor-car.