“Looks just the same to me,” said my friend, an American journalist who had been there in 1912.  “Of course there are more soldiers.  Outside of that, and a lack of taxicabs and motorcars, the town has not changed.”

But there was a difference, and a great difference.  There was a terrible absence of youth.  Not that youth was entirely absent from the tables and the trottoirs; it was visible, putty-faced and unhealthy-looking, afraid to meet the gaze of a man in uniform, the pitiable jeunesse that could not pass the physical examination of the army.  Most of the other young men who bent over the tables talking, or leaned back on a divan to smoke cigarettes, were strangers, and I saw many who were unquestionably Roumanians or Greeks.  A little apart, at a corner table, a father and mother were dining with a boy in a uniform much too large for him;—­I fancied from the cut of his clothes that he belonged to a young squad still under instruction in the garrisons, and that he was enjoying a night off with his family.  Screened from the rest by a clothes rack, a larky young lieutenant was discreetly conversing with a “daughter of joy,” and an elderly English officer, severely proper and correct, was reading “Punch” and sipping red wine in Britannic isolation.  Across the street an immense poster announced, “Conference in aid of the Belgian Red Cross—­the German Outrages in Louvain, Malines, and Liege—­illustrated.”

We finished our dinner, which was good and not costly, and started to walk to our hotel.  Hardly had we turned the corner of the Place, when the life of Bordeaux went out like a torch extinguished by the wind.  It was still early in the evening, there was a sound of an orchestra somewhere behind, yet ahead of us, lonely and still, with its shops closed and its sidewalks deserted, was one of the greater streets of Bordeaux.  Through the drawn curtains of second stories over little groceries and baker-shops shone the yellow light of lamps.  What had happened to the Jean, Paul, and Pierre of this dark street since the war began?  What tragedies of sorrow and loneliness might these silent windows not conceal?  And every French city is much the same; one notices in them all the subtle lack of youth, and the animation of the great squares in contrast to the somber loneliness of streets and quarters which once were alive and gay.  At the Place de l’Opera in Paris, the whirlpool of Parisian life is still turning, but the great streets leading away from the Place de l’Etoile are quiet.  Young and old, laborer and shopkeeper, boulevardier and apache are far away holding the tragic lines.

The next morning at the station, I had my first glimpse of that mighty organization which surrounds the militaire.  There was a special entrance for soldiers and a special exit for soldiers, and at both of these a long file of blue-clad poilus waited for the countersigning of their furlough slips and military tickets.  The mud of the trenches still stained the bottom edges of their overcoats, and their steel helmets were dented and dull.  There was something fine about the faces collectively; there was a certain look of tried endurance and perils bravely borne.  I heard those on furlough telling the names of their home villages to the officer in charge,—­pleasant old names, Saint-Pierre aux Vignes, La Tour du Roi.