An hour later we sallied forth to see Paris in war time.  Our way lay through the lonely Vendome, out by the empty Rue Castiglione, down the Rue de Rivoli.  So we came into the great beautiful Place de la Concorde; and what a wide and magnificent waste it was.  Now and then a wayfarer might be seen crossing its splendid distances, or a taxicab spinning along through the statuesque grandeur of the place.  But the few moving objects in the white stretch of marble and cement only accented its lonely aspect.  The circle of the French provinces was as desolate as the Pompeiian Forum, and save for the bright colours of the banks of flowers that were heaped upon the monuments to Alsace and Lorraine, the place might have been an excavation rather than the heart of a great world metropolis.  Before the war, to cross the Place de la Concorde and go into the Champs Elysees was an adventure of a life time.  One took one’s chances.  One survived, but he had his thrills.  But that morning we might have walked safely with bowed head and hands clasped behind us through the Place, across the Elysian fields; there we sat for a moment in one of the Babylonian cafes and saw nothing more shocking than the beautiful women of France gathering in the abandoned cafes and music halls to assemble surgical dressings for the French wounded.

In due course, in that first day of our pilgrimage in Europe, we came to the headquarters of the American Red Cross in the Place de la Concorde.  The five floors of a building once used for a man’s club are now filled with bustling, hustling Americans.  Those delicately tinted souls in Europe who are homesick for Broadway may find it in the office of the American Red Cross; but they will find lower Broadway, not the place of the bright lights.  The click and clatter of typewriters punctuate the air.  Natty stenographers, prim office women, matronly looking heads of departments, and assistants from perhaps the tubercular department, the reconstruction department, the bureau of home relief in Paris, or what not, move briskly through the corridors.  In the reception rooms are men from the ends of the earth—­Rumanians, Serbians, Armenians, Belgians, Boers, Russians, Japs—­every nation at peace with America has some business sometime in that Paris office of the American Red Cross.  For there abides the commissioner of the Red Cross for all Europe.  At that time he was a spare, well made man in his late thirties,—­Major Grayson M. P. Murphy; a West Pointer who left the army fifteen years ago after service in the Philippines, started “broke” in New York peddling insurance, and quit business last June vice-president of the largest trust company in the world, making the climb at considerable speed, but without much noise.  He was the quietest man in Paris.  He was so quiet that he had to have a muffler cut-out on his own great heart to keep it from drowning his voice!  There is a soft lisp in his speech which might fool strangers who do not