p to Paris IF THERE ARE PLACES LEFT after the army is accommodated.
There is no guaranty that I can get back the same day. Still, I am
going to risk it. I am afraid to be any longer without money, though
goodness knows what I can do with it. Besides, I find that all my
friends are flying, and I feel as if I should like to say "good-bye"--I
don't know why, but I feel like indulging the impulse. Anyway, I am
going to try it. I am going armed with every sort of paper--provisional
passport from our consul, permis de sejour from my mayor here, and a
local permit to enter and leave Paris, which does not allow me to stay
inside the fortifications after six o'clock at night, unless I get
myself identified at the prefecture of the arrondissement in which I
propose to stay and have my passport vised.

X

August 24, 1914.

I seem to be able to get my letters off to you much more regularly than
I dared to hope.

I went up to Paris on the 19th, and had to stay over one night. The
trip up was long and tedious, but interesting. There were soldiers
everywhere. It amused me almost to tears to see the guards all along
the line. We hear so much of the wonderful equipment of the German
army. Germany has been spending fortunes for years on its equipment.
French taxpayers have kicked for years against spending public moneys on
war preparations. The guards all along the railroad were not a jot
better got up than those in our little commune. There they stand all
along the track in their patched trousers and blouses and sabots, with a
band round the left arm, a broken soldier cap, and a gun on the
shoulder. Luckily the uniform and shaved head do not make the soldier.

Just before we reached Chelles we saw the first signs of actual war
preparations, as there we ran inside the wire entanglements that protect
the approach to the outer fortifications at Paris, and at Pantin we saw
the first concentration of trains--miles and miles of made-up trains all
carrying the Red Cross on their doors, and line after line of trucks
with gray ammunition wagons, and cannons. We were being constantly held
up to let trainloads of soldiers and horses pass. In the station we saw
a long train being made up of men going to some point on the line to
join their regiments. It was a crowd of men who looked the lower
laboring class. They were in their working clothes, many of them almost
in rags, each carrying in a bundle, or a twine bag, h