The next morning, as if by magic, hundreds of taxis had sprung into existence, though they were much in demand.  And in spite of the soldiers thronging the sunlit streets, Paris was seemingly the same Paris one had always known, gay—­insouciante, pleasure-bent.  The luxury shops appeared to be thriving, the world-renowned restaurants to be doing business as usual; to judge from the prices, a little better than usual; the expensive hotels were full.  It is not the real France, of course, yet it seemed none the less surprising that it should still exist.  Oddly enough the presence of such overwhelming numbers of soldiers should have failed to strike the note of war, emphasized that of lavishness, of the casting off of mundane troubles for which the French capital has so long been known.  But so it was.  Most of these soldiers were here precisely with the object of banishing from their minds the degradations and horrors of the region from which they had come, and which was so unbelievably near; a few hours in an automobile—­less than that in one of those dragon-fly machines we saw intermittently hovering in the blue above our heads!

Paris, to most Americans, means that concentrated little district de luxe of which the Place Vendome is the centre, and we had always unconsciously thought of it as in the possession of the Anglo-Saxons.  So it seems today.  One saw hundreds of French soldiers, of course, in all sorts of uniforms, from the new grey blue and visor to the traditional cloth blouse and kepi; once in a while a smart French officer.  The English and Canadians, the Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans were much in evidence.  Set them down anywhere on the face of the globe, under any conditions conceivable, and you could not surprise them; such was the impression.  The British officers and even the British Tommies were blase, wearing the air of the ‘semaine Anglaise’, and the “five o’clock tea,” as the French delight to call it.  That these could have come direct from the purgatory of the trenches seemed unbelievable.  The Anzacs, with looped-up hats, strolled about, enjoying themselves, halting before the shops in the Rue de la Paix to gaze at the priceless jewellery there, or stopping at a sidewalk cafe to enjoy a drink.  Our soldiers had not seen the front; many of them, no doubt, were on leave from the training-camps, others were on duty in Paris, but all seemed in a hurry to get somewhere, bound for a definite destination.  They might have been in New York or San Francisco.  It was a novel sight, indeed, to observe them striding across the Place Vendome with out so much as deigning to cast a glance at the column dedicated to the great emperor who fought that other world-war a century ago; to see our square-shouldered officers hustling around corners in Ford and Packard automobiles.  And the atmosphere of our communication headquarters was so essentially one of “getting things done” as to make one forget the mediaeval narrowness of the Rue Sainte Anne, and the inconvenient French private-dwelling arrangements of the house.  You were transported back to America.  Such, too, was the air of our Red Cross establishment in the ancient building facing the Palace de la Concorde, where the unfortunate Louis lost his head.