The next day the army of midsummer travel was immobilized to let the other army move.  No more wild rushes to the station, no more bribing of concierges, vain quests for invisible cabs, haggard hours of waiting in the queue at Cook’s.  No train stirred except to carry soldiers, and the civilians who had not bribed and jammed their way into a cranny of the thronged carriages leaving the first night could only creep back through the hot streets to their hotel and wait.  Back they went, disappointed yet half-relieved, to the resounding emptiness of porterless halls, waiterless restaurants, motionless lifts:  to the queer disjointed life of fashionable hotels suddenly reduced to the intimacies and make-shift of a Latin Quarter pension. Meanwhile it was strange to watch the gradual paralysis of the city.  As the motors, taxis, cabs and vans had vanished from the streets, so the lively little steamers had left the Seine.  The canal-boats too were gone, or lay motionless:  loading and unloading had ceased.  Every great architectural opening framed an emptiness; all the endless avenues stretched away to desert distances.  In the parks and gardens no one raked the paths or trimmed the borders.  The fountains slept in their basins, the worried sparrows fluttered unfed, and vague dogs, shaken out of their daily habits, roamed unquietly, looking for familiar eyes.  Paris, so intensely conscious yet so strangely entranced, seemed to have had curare injected into all her veins.

The next day—­the 2nd of August—­from the terrace of the Hotel de Crillon one looked down on a first faint stir of returning life.  Now and then a taxi-cab or a private motor crossed the Place de la Concorde, carrying soldiers to the stations.  Other conscripts, in detachments, tramped by on foot with bags and banners.  One detachment stopped before the black-veiled statue of Strasbourg and laid a garland at her feet.  In ordinary times this demonstration would at once have attracted a crowd; but at the very moment when it might have been expected to provoke a patriotic outburst it excited no more attention than if one of the soldiers had turned aside to give a penny to a beggar.  The people crossing the square did not even stop to look.  The meaning of this apparent indifference was obvious.  When an armed nation mobilizes, everybody is busy, and busy in a definite and pressing way.  It is not only the fighters that mobilize:  those who stay behind must do the same.  For each French household, for each individual man or woman in France, war means a complete reorganization of life.  The detachment of conscripts, unnoticed, paid their tribute to the Cause and passed on...

Looked back on from these sterner months those early days in Paris, in their setting of grave architecture and summer skies, wear the light of the ideal and the abstract.  The sudden flaming up of national life, the abeyance of every small and mean preoccupation, cleared the moral air as the streets had been cleared, and made the spectator feel as though he were reading a great poem on War rather than facing its realities.