We had not expected to spend the night in Rheims, so, with Ashmead Bartlett, the military expert of the London Daily Telegraph, I went into a chemist’s shop to buy some soap.  The chemist, seeing I was an American, became very much excited.  He was overstocked with an American shaving-soap, and he begged me to take it off his hands.  He would let me have it at what it cost him.  He did not know where he had placed it, and he was in great alarm lest we would leave his shop before he could unload it on us.  From both sides of the town French artillery were firing in salvoes, the shocks shaking the air; over the shop of the chemist shrapnel was whining, and in the street the howitzer shells were opening up subways.  But his mind was intent only on finding that American shaving-soap.  I was anxious to get on to a more peaceful neighborhood.  To French soap, to soap “made in Germany,” to neutral American soap I was indifferent.  Had it not been for the presence of Ashmead Bartlett I would have fled.  To die, even though clasping a cake of American soap, seemed less attractive than to live unwashed.  But the chemist had no time to consider shells.  He was intent only on getting rid of surplus stock.

The majority of people who are afraid are those who refuse to consider the doctrine of chances.  The chances of their being hit may be one in ten thousand, but they disregard the odds in their favor and fix their minds on that one chance against them.  In their imagination it grows larger and larger.  It looms red and bloodshot, it hovers over them; wherever they go it follows, menacing, threatening, filling them with terror.  In Rheims there were one hundred thousand people, and by shells one thousand were killed or wounded.  The chances against were a hundred to one.  Those who left the city undoubtedly thought the odds were not good enough.

Those who on account of the bombs that fell from the German aeroplanes into Paris left that city had no such excuse.  The chance of any one person being hit by a bomb was one in several millions.  But even with such generous odds in their favor, during the days the bomb-dropping lasted many thousands fled.  They were obsessed by that one chance against them.  In my hotel in Paris my landlady had her mind fixed on that one chance, and regularly every afternoon when the aeroplanes were expected she would go to bed.  Just as regularly her husband would take a pair of opera-glasses and in the Rue de la Paix hopefully scan the sky.

One afternoon while we waited in front of Cook’s an aeroplane sailed overhead, but so far above us that no one knew whether it was a French air-ship scouting or a German one preparing to launch a bomb.  A man from Cook’s, one of the interpreters, with a horrible knowledge of English, said:  “Taube or not Taube; that is the question.”  He was told he was inviting a worse death than from a bomb.  To illustrate the attitude of mind of the Parisian, there is the story of the street gamin who for some time, from the Garden of the Tuileries, had been watching a German aeroplane threatening the city.  Finally, he exclaimed impatiently: