after tomorrow, at six o'clock in the morning, we entrain for Paris. We have one day to clothe, equip and arm our company."

It is no small matter to clothe, equip and arm two hundred and fifty men in twenty-four hours. You have to find in the enormous pile, which is in a corner of a shed, two hundred and fifty coats, pairs of trousers and hats which will fit two hundred and fifty entirely separate and distinct chests, legs and heads. You have to find five hundred pairs of shoes for two hundred and fifty pairs of feet. You have to arrange the men in rank according to their heights, form the sections and the squads. You have to have soup prepared and transport provisions. You have to go and get rifles and cartridges. You have to get funds advanced for the company accounts from the very beginning of the campaign. You have to get your duties organized, make up accounts and prepare statements. You have to breathe the breath of life into the little machine which is going to take its place in the big machine.

And there was not a person there to help us to do this—not a line officer, not a second lieutenant. The captain had to act on his own, to think on his own, to decide everything on his own. He had to do all by himself the work that yesterday twenty-five department store heads, twenty-five shoe makers and twenty-five certified public accountants would have had a hard time doing.

He did it! Every captain in the French Army did it. And the next morning at six o'clock our little machine was ready to go and take its place in the operations of the big machine. The following day, at six o'clock, we entrained again; but no longer was it the confused and disorganized crowd that it had been the evening before. It was a company with arms and leaders; a company which had already made the acquaintance of discipline. That was proved by the silence reigning everywhere. At the moment of departure the Colonel had commanded:

"Silence!"

There was not a sound. The long train, crowded with soldiers, was a silent train which passed through the open country, the towns and the villages all the way to Paris without a sound except the puffing of the engine. In the evening, silent always, we detrained at Paris and marched to a barracks situated to the north of the capital. We were to stay there a month.

The story of Paris during the month of August, 1914, is an extraordinary one that would deserve an entire volume to itself. That feverish city has never lived through hours that were more calm and peaceful. During the first two weeks Paris seemed to be in a sweet, peaceful dream, in which the citizens listened eagerly for sounds of victory coming from the far distant horizon. On the twenty-fifth of August Paris, which had heard only vague echoes of the Battle of Charleroi, awakened with a jolt when it read the famous communiqué beginning with the words: "De la Somme aux Vosges...."

So the enemy was already at the Somme, a few days' march from the capital! But the awakening was as free from disturbance as the dream had been. Paris felt absolute confidence in the army, in Joffre; and the Parisian reasoning was expressed in one phrase, "The army has retreated, but it is neither destroyed nor beaten; as long as the army is there, Paris has nothing to fear...." And when Sunday the thirtieth of August came, Paris was as calm and confident as it was on the first day of the war.

I shall remember the thirtieth of August for a long time.

They had posted on all the walls two notices. One of them was large, the other small. The large one was a proclamation of the Government announcing the departure of its officials for Bordeaux:

The small notice was from General Gallieni, the new Governor of Paris. It had, in its brevity, the beauty of an ancient inscription:

That same Sunday, the thirtieth of August, was the first day the Taubes came over Paris. By chance I was guarding one of the city's gates. I saw the airplane coming from a distance. I had not the least doubt about it for it had the silhouette of a bird of prey that rendered the German planes so easily recognizable at that time. For that matter, no one was deceived by it, and from all the batteries, forts and other positions a violent fusillade greeted it. There was firing from the streets, windows, courts and roofs. I followed it through my field glass, and for a moment I thought it had been hit, for it paused in its flight. But this was an optical illusion.... The plane simply flew higher, having without doubt heard the sound of the fusillade and the bullets having perhaps whistled too close to the pilot's ears. When he was almost over my post, a light white cloud appeared under its wings and, in the ten ensuing seconds, there followed a terrible series of sounds, for a bomb had just fallen and exploded very near at hand. But so entrancing was it to observe the flight of this pirate who, in spite of everything, continued in his audacious course, that I gazed at the heavens, trying to determine whether or not I saw once more the little white cloud, the precursor of the machine of death.

And everyone who was near me—workmen, passers-by, women, children—stayed there too, their feet firmly on the ground, their glances lost in the limitless sky. No one ran away; no one hid; no one sought refuge behind a door or in a cellar. It's a characteristic of airplane bombs that they frighten no one, even when they kill. The machine you see does not frighten you; only the machine you can't see upsets your nerves.

However that may be, the curiosity of Paris was insatiable. Even in the tragic hours we were living through at that time, this curiosity remained as eager, ardent and amused as ever. Every afternoon, at the stroke of four, crowds collected in the squares and avenues. The motive was to see the Taubes! Since one Taube had flown over the city, no one doubted that a second one would come the next day. A girl's boarding school obtained a free afternoon to enjoy the spectacle. The midinettes were allowed to leave their work. At Montmartre, where the steps of the Butte gave a better chance of scanning the horizon, places were in great demand.

There was a crowd along the fortifications to see the works for the defense on which, by General Gallieni's order, men were working. Thousands of spectators of both sexes, but especially of women, were examining the bases that were being put in for the guns, the openings they were making to serve as loopholes, the joists they were putting across the gates, and the paving stones with which the entrances were being barricaded. This crowd did not want to believe in the proximity of the