It was sunset when we reached the gates of Paris.  Under the heights of St. Cloud and Suresnes the reaches of the Seine trembled with the blue-pink lustre of an early Monet.  The Bois lay about us in the stillness of a holiday evening, and the lawns of Bagatelle were as fresh as June.  Below the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysees sloped downward in a sun-powdered haze to the mist of fountains and the ethereal obelisk; and the currents of summer life ebbed and flowed with a normal beat under the trees of the radiating avenues.  The great city, so made for peace and art and all humanest graces, seemed to lie by her river-side like a princess guarded by the watchful giant of the Eiffel Tower.

The next day the air was thundery with rumours.  Nobody believed them, everybody repeated them.  War?  Of course there couldn’t be war!  The Cabinets, like naughty children, were again dangling their feet over the edge; but the whole incalculable weight of things-as-they-were, of the daily necessary business of living, continued calmly and convincingly to assert itself against the bandying of diplomatic words.  Paris went on steadily about her mid-summer business of feeding, dressing, and amusing the great army of tourists who were the only invaders she had seen for nearly half a century.

All the while, every one knew that other work was going on also.  The whole fabric of the country’s seemingly undisturbed routine was threaded with noiseless invisible currents of preparation, the sense of them was in the calm air as the sense of changing weather is in the balminess of a perfect afternoon.  Paris counted the minutes till the evening papers came.

They said little or nothing except what every one was already declaring all over the country.  “We don’t want war—­mais it faut que cela finisse!” “This kind of thing has got to stop”:  that was the only phase one heard.  If diplomacy could still arrest the war, so much the better:  no one in France wanted it.  All who spent the first days of August in Paris will testify to the agreement of feeling on that point.  But if war had to come, the country, and every heart in it, was ready.

At the dressmaker’s, the next morning, the tired fitters were preparing to leave for their usual holiday.  They looked pale and anxious—­decidedly, there was a new weight of apprehension in the air.  And in the rue Royale, at the corner of the Place de la Concorde, a few people had stopped to look at a little strip of white paper against the wall of the Ministere de la Marine.  “General mobilization” they read—­and an armed nation knows what that means.  But the group about the paper was small and quiet.  Passers by read the notice and went on.  There were no cheers, no gesticulations:  the dramatic sense of the race had already told them that the event was too great to be dramatized.  Like a monstrous landslide it had fallen across the path of an orderly laborious nation, disrupting its routine, annihilating its industries, rending families apart, and burying under a heap of senseless ruin the patiently and painfully wrought machinery of civilization...