13

The shadow of war crept through every keyhole in Paris, and no man or woman shut up in a high attic with some idea or passion could keep out the evil genii which dominated the intellect and the imagination, and put its cold touch upon the senses, through that winter of agony when the best blood in France slopped into the waterlogged trenches from Flanders to the Argonne.  Yet there were coteries in Paris which thrust the Thing away from them as much as possible, and tried to pretend that art was still alive, and that philosophy was untouched by these brutalities.  In the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts and other boites where men of ideas pander to the baser appetites for 1 franc 50 (vin compris), old artists, old actors, sculptors whose beards seemed powdered with the dust of their ateliers, and litterateurs who will write you a sonnet or an epitaph, a wedding speech, or a political manifesto in the finest style of French poesy and prose (a little archaic in expression) assembled nightly just as in the days of peace.  Some of the youngest faces who used to be grouped about the tables had gone, and now and then there was silence for a second as one of the habitues would raise his glass to the memory of a soldier of France (called to the colours on that fatal day in August) who had fallen on the Field of Honour.  The ghost of war stalked even into the Restaurant des Beaux-Arts, but his presence was ignored as much as might be by these long-haired Bohemians with grease-stained clothes and unwashed hands who discussed the spirit of Greek beauty, the essential viciousness of women, the vulgarity of the bourgeoisie, the prose of Anatole France, the humour of Rabelais and his successors, and other eternal controversies with a pretext of their old fire.  If the theme of war slipped in it was discussed with an intellectual contempt, and loose-lipped old men found a frightful mirth in the cut-throat exploits of Moroccans and Senegalese, in the bestial orgies of drunken Boches, and in the most revolting horrors of bayonet charges and the corps-a-corps.  It was as though they wanted to reveal the savagery of war to the last indescribable madness of its lust.  “Pah!” said an old cabotin, after one of these word-pictures.  “This war is the last spasm of the world’s barbarity.  Human nature will finish with it this time. . . .  Let us talk of the women we have loved.  I knew a splendid creature once—­she had golden hair, I remember—­”

One of these shabby old gentlemen touched me on the arm.

“Would Monsieur care to have a little music?  It is quite close here, and very beautiful.  It helps one to forget the war, and all its misery.”

I accepted the invitation.  I was more thirsty for music than for vin ordinaire or cordiale Medoc.  Yet I did not expect very much round the corner of a restaurant frequented by shabby intellectuals...  That was my English stupidity.

A little group of us went through a dark courtyard lit by a high dim lantern, touching a sculptured figure in a far recess.