Next day and the following days everybody went headlong to meet the newspapers.  We read in them—­and under their different titles they were then all alike—­that a great and unanimous upspringing was electrifying France, and the little crowd that we were felt itself also caught by the rush of enthusiasm and resolution.  We looked at each other with shining eyes of approval.  I, too, I heard myself cry, “At last!” All our patriotism rose to the surface.

Our quarter grew fevered.  We made speeches, we proclaimed the moral verities—­or explained them.  The echoes of vast or petty news went by in us.  In the streets, the garrison officers walked, grown taller, disclosed.  It was announced that Major de Trancheaux had rejoined, in spite of his years, and that the German armies had attacked us in three places at once.  We cursed the Kaiser and rejoiced in his imminent chastisement.  In the middle of it all France appeared personified, and we reflected on her great life, now suddenly and nakedly exposed.

“It was easy to foresee this war, eh?” said Crillon.

Monsieur Joseph Boneas summarized the world-drama.  We were all pacific to the point of stupidity—­little saints, in fact.  No one in France spoke any longer of revenge, nobody wished it, nobody thought of as much as getting ready for war.  We had all of us in our hearts only dreams of universal happiness and progress, the while Germany secretly prepared everything for hurling herself on us.  “But,” he added, he also carried away, “she’ll get it in the neck, and that’s all about it!”

The desire for glory was making its way, and one cloudily imagines Napoleon reborn.

In these days, only the mornings and evenings returned as usual, everything else was upside down, and seemed temporary.  The workers moved and talked in a desert of idleness, and one saw invisible changes in the scenery of our valley and the cavity of our sky.

We saw the Cuirassiers of the garrison go away in the evening.  The massive platoons of young-faced horsemen, whose solemn obstruction heavily hammered the stones of the street, were separated by horses loaded with bales of forage, by regimental wagons and baggage-carts, which rattled unendingly.  We formed a hedgerow along the twilight causeways and watched them all disappear.  Suddenly we cheered them.  The thrill that went through horses and men straightened them up and they went away bigger—­as if they were coming back!

“It’s magnificent, how warlike we are in France!” said fevered Marie, squeezing my arm with all her might.

The departures, of individuals or groups, multiplied.  A sort of methodical and inevitable tree-blazing—­conducted sometimes by the police—­ransacked the population and thinned it from day to day around the women.

Increasing hurly-burly was everywhere—­all the complicated measures so prudently foreseen and so interdependent; the new posters on top of the old ones, the requisitioning of animals and places, the committees and the allowances, the booming and momentous gales of motor-cars filled with officers and aristocratic nurses—­so many lives turned inside out and habits cut in two.  But hope bedazzled all anxieties and stopped up the gaps for the moment.  And we admired the beauty of military orderliness and France’s preparation.