They were Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes in that room, with a few Parisians among them.  Students to whom all life is expressed in music, they went on with their work in spite of the war.  But war had touched their spirit too, with its great tragedy, and found expression in their art.  It was but one glimpse behind the scenes of Paris, in time of war, and in thousands of other rooms, whose window-curtains were drawn to veil their light from hostile aircraft, the people who come to Paris as the great university of intellect and emotion, continued their studies and their way of life, with vibrations of fiddle-strings and scraping of palettes and adventures among books.

Even the artists’ clubs had not all closed their doors, though so many young painters were mixing blood with mud and watching impressionistic pictures of ruined villages through the smoke of shells.  Through cigarette smoke I gazed at the oddest crowd in one of these clubs off the Boulevard Saint-Germain.  Slavs with matted hair, American girls in Futurist frocks, Italians like figures out of pre-Raphaelite frescoes, men with monkey faces and monkey manners, men with the faces of mediaeval saints a little debauched by devilish temptations, filled the long bare room, spoke in strange tongues to each other, and made love passionately in the universal language and in dark corners provided with ragged divans.  A dwarf creature perched on a piano stool teased the keys of an untuned piano and drew forth adorable melody, skipping the broken notes with great agility. ...  It was the same old Paris, even in time of war.

14

The artists of neutral countries who still kept to their lodgings in the Quartier Latin and fanned the little flame of inspiration which kept them warm though fuel is dear, could not get any publicity for their works.  There was no autumn or spring salon in the Palais des Beaux-Arts, where every year till war came one might watch the progress of French art according to the latest impulse of the time stirring the emotions of men and women who claim the fullest liberties even for their foolishness.  War had killed the Cubists, and many of the Futurists had gone to the front to see the odd effects of scarlet blood on green grass.  The Grand Palais was closed to the public.  Yet there were war pictures here, behind closed doors, and sculpture stranger than anything conceived by Marinetti.  I went to see the show, and when I came out again into the sunlight of the gardens, I felt very cold, and there was a queer trembling in my limbs.

The living pictures and the moving statuary in the Grand Palais exhibited the fine arts of war as they are practised by civilized men using explosive shells, with bombs, shrapnel, hand-grenades, mitrailleuses, trench-mines, and other ingenious instruments by which the ordinary designs of God may be re-drawn and re-shaped to suit the modern tastes of men.  I saw here the Spring Exhibition of the Great War, as it is catalogued by surgeons, doctors, and scientific experts in wounds and nerve diseases.