s Elysees to the
Porte Maillot. The great salesrooms of the German motor-car dealers had
been given by the Government to a number of military charities who had
covered the trade signs with swathes and rosettes of their national
colors. Under the banner of the Belgians, in the quondam hop of the
Mercedes, was an exhibition of leather knickknacks, baskets, and dolls
made by the blind and mutilated soldiers. The articles--children's toys
for the most part, dwarfs that rolled over and over on a set of parallel
bars, Alsatian lasses with flaxen hair, and gay tops--were exposed on a
row of tables a few feet back from the window. By the Porte Maillot,
some of the iron saw-horses with sharpened points, which had formed part
of the barricade built there in the days of the Great Retreat, lay, a
villainous, rusty heap, in a grassy ditch of the city wall; a few stumps
of the trees that had been then cut down were still visible, and from a
railroad tie embedded in the sidewalk hung six links of a massive chain.
Through this forgotten flotsam on the great shore of the war, the quiet
crowds went in and out of the Maillot entrance to the Bois de Boulogne.
There was a sense of order and security in the air. I took a seat on the
terrace of a little restaurant. The garcon was a small man in the
fifties, inclined to corpulence, with a large head, large, blue-gray
eyes, purplish lips, and blue-black hair cut pompadour. As we watched
the orderly, Sunday crowds going to the great park, we fell into
conversation about the calmness of Paris. "Yes, it is calm," he said;
"we are all waiting (nous attendons). We know that the victory will be
ours at the finish. But all we can do is to wait. I have two sons at the
front." He had struck the keynote. Paris is calmly waiting--waiting for
the end of the war, for victory, for the return of her children.

Yet in this great, calm city, with its vaporous browns and slaty blues,
and its characteristic acrid smell of gasoline fumes, was another Paris,
a terrible Paris, which I was that night to see. Early in the afternoon
a dull haze of leaden clouds rose in the southwest. It began to rain.

In a great garret of the hospital, under a high French roof, was the
dormitory of the volunteers attached to the Paris Ambulance Section. At
night, this great space was lit by only one light, a battered electric
reading-lamp standing on a kind of laboratory table in the center of the
floor, and window curtains of dark-bl