The Eiffel Tower hung a cobweb in the sky.  Its wires had been thrilling to the secrets of war, and this signal station was barricaded so that no citizens might go near, or pass the sentries pacing there with loaded rifles.  But now it was receiving other messages, not of war.  The wireless operator with the receiver at his ears must have heard those whispers coming from the earth:  “I am spring...  The earth is waking...  I am coming with the beauty of life...  I am gladness and youth...”

Perhaps even the sentry pacing up and down the wooden barricade heard the approach of some unseen presence when he stood still that morning and peered through the morning sunlight.  “Halt! who goes there?” “A friend.”  “Pass, friend, and give the countersign.”

The countersign was “Spring,” and where the spirit of it stepped, golden crocuses had thrust up through the warming earth, not far from where, a night or two before, fire-balls dropped from a hostile air-craft.

Oh, strange and tragic spring, of this year 1915!  Was it possible that, while Nature was preparing her beauty for the earth, and was busy in the ways of life, men should be heaping her fields with death, and drenching this fair earth with blood?

One could not forget.  Even in Paris away from the sound of the guns which had roared in my ears a week before, and away from the moan of the wounded which had made my ears ache worse than the noise of battle, I could not forget the tragedy of all this death which was being piled up under the blue sky, and on fields all astir with the life of the year.

In the Tuileries gardens the buds were green.  But there were black figures below them.  The women who sat there all the afternoon, sewing, and knitting, or with idle hands in their laps, were clothed in widows’ black.  I glanced into the face of one of these figures as I passed.  She was quite a girl to whom the spring-song should have called with a loud, clear note of joy.  But her head drooped and her eyes were steadfast as they stared at the pathway, and the sunshine brought no colour into her white cheeks...  She shivered a little, and pulled her crepe veil closer about her face.

Down the broad pathway between the white statues came a procession of cripples.  They wore the uniforms of the French army, and were mostly young men in the prime of life, to whom also the spring should have brought a sense of vital joy, of intense and energetic life.  But they dragged between their crutches while their lopped limbs hung free.  A little further off in a patch of sunshine beyond the wall of the Jeu de Paumes, sat half a dozen soldiers of France with loose sleeves pinned to their coats, or with only one leg to rest upon the ground.  One of them was blind and sat there with his face to the sun, staring towards the fountain of the nymphs with sightless eyes.  Those six comrades of war were quite silent, and did not “fight their battles o’er again.”  Perhaps they were sad because they heard the spring-song, and knew that they could never step out again to the dance-tune of youth.