Among the picture post-cards then on sale was one of Marianne, who is France, bound for the front in an aeroplane with a crowing French cock sitting on the brace above her.  Marianne looked as happy as if she were going to the races; the cock as triumphant as if he had a spur through the German eagle’s throat.  However, there was little sale for picture post-cards or other trifles, while Paris waited for the siege.  They did not help to win victories.  News and not jeux d’esprit, victory and not wit, was wanted.

For Marianne went to war with her liberty cap drawn tight over her brow, a beat in her temples, and her heart in her throat; and the cock had his head down and pointed at the enemy.  She was relieved in a way, as all Europe was, that the thing had come; at last an end of the straining of competitive taxation and preparation; at last the test.  She had no Channel, as England had, between her and the foe.  Defeat meant the heel of the enemy on her soil, German sentries in her streets, submission.  Long and hard she had trained; while the outside world, thinking of the Paris of the boulevards, thought that she could not resist the Kaiser’s legions.  She was effeminate, effete.  She was all right to run cafes and make artificial flowers, but she lacked beef.  All the prestige was with her enemy.  In ’70 all the prestige had been with her.  For there is no prestige like military prestige.  It is all with those who won the last war.

“But if we must succumb, let it be now,” said the French.

On, on—­the German corps were coming like some machine-controlled avalanche of armed men.  Every report brought them a little nearer Paris.  Ah, monsieur, they had numbers, those Germans!  Every German mother has many sons; a French mother only one or two.

How could one believe those official communiques which kept saying that the position of the French armies was favourable and then admitted that von Kluck had advanced another twenty miles?  The heart of Paris stopped beating.  Paris held its breath.  Perhaps the reason there was no panic was that Parisians had been prepared for the worst.

What silence!  The old men and the women in the streets moved as under a spell, which was the sense of their own helplessness.  But few people were abroad, and those going on errands apparently.  The absence of traffic and pedestrians heightened the sepulchral appearance to superficial observation.  At the windows of flats, inside the little shops, and on by-streets, you saw waiting faces, everyone with the weight of national grief become personal.  Was Paris alive?  Yes, if Paris is human and not bricks and stone.  Every Parisian was living a century in a week.  So, too, was one who loved France.  In the prospect of its loss he realized the value of all that France stands for, her genius, her democracy, her spirit.