“Suzette!  Ma petite!  O, mon Dieu!” A policeman was bending over little Suzette.  Then he stood straight and raised a clenched fist to the sky.  “Sale Boche! ...  Assassin! ...  Sale cochon!” People came running up the street and out of the courtyards.  An ambulance glided swiftly through the crowd.  A little girl whose name was Suzette was picked up from the edge of the kerbstone out of a pool of blood.  Her face lay sideways on the policeman’s shoulder, as white as a sculptured angel on a tombstone.  It seemed that she would never walk again, this little Suzette, whose footsteps had gone dancing through the streets of Paris.  It was always like that when a Taube came.  That bird of death chose women and children as its prey, and Paris cursed the cowards who made war on their innocents.

But Paris was not afraid.  The women did not stay indoors because between one street and another they might be struck out of life, without a second’s warning.  They glanced up to the sky and smiled disdainfully.  They were glad even that a Taube should come now and then, so that they, the women of Paris, might run some risks in this war and share its perils with their men, who every day in the trenches la-bas, faced death for the sake of France.  “Our chance of death is a million to one,” said some of them.  “We should be poor things to take fright at that!”

12

But there were other death-ships that might come sailing through the sky on a fair night without wind or moon.  The enemy tried to affright the soul of Paris by warnings of the destruction coming to them with a fleet of Zeppelins.  But Paris scoffed.  “Je m’en fiche de vos Zeppelins!” said the spirit of Paris.  As the weeks passed by and the months, and still no Zeppelins came, the menace became a jest.  The very word of Zeppelin was heard with hilarity.  There were comic articles in the newspapers, taunting the German Count who had made those gas-bags.  There were also serious articles proving the impossibility of a raid by airships.  They would be chased by French aviators as soon as they were sighted.  They would be like the Spanish Armada, surrounded by the little English warships, pouring shot and shell into their unwieldy hulks.  Not one would escape down the wind.

The police of Paris, more nervous than the public, devised a system of signals if Zeppelins were sighted.  There were to be bugle-calls throughout the city, and the message they gave would mean “lights out!” in every part of Paris.  For several nights there were rehearsals of darkness, without the bugle-calls, and the city was plunged into abysmal gloom, through which people who had been dining in restaurants lost themselves in familiar streets and groped their way with little shouts of laughter as they bumped into substantial shadows.