high pressure; meals are hurriedly
swallowed at odd moments and at irregular hours. Each night I walk
home across Paris, down the Rue Freycinet, over the Pont de l'Alma,
through the Avenue Bosquet, Avenue Duquesne, Rue Oudinot to the Rue
d'Olivet--and sleep. It is a long walk when one is dead tired, but
there are no public conveyances at night and, indeed, few in the
daytime. The walk takes nearly an hour, even at a fast gait, for at
short intervals one is halted by policemen demanding explanations of
this midnight journey. Few experiences have been more weird than this
nightly trip through the familiar Paris streets, strangely dark and
absolutely deserted.

Each day is now a haze of Germans and their troubles; of policemen,
detectives, and soldiers, of tears and laughter, bits of the sublime
and the ridiculous; of women who have been robbed and men who have
been arrested as spies; of constant struggles to secure papers for
poor hounded creatures, which one policeman demands and another
refuses to grant; of beaten faces and tear-stained cheeks; of French
women endlessly begging unobtainable news of sons lost in Germany,
and of petty crookednesses on the part of those we are trying to help
and protect.

Affairs are, however, running more smoothly. We have found means to
get small change in large quantities, and I now know personally most
of the police officials who are concerned in German affairs.

* * * * *

I have heard the Marseillaise sung upon hundreds of peaceful
occasions; have risen when it was played in French theaters; have
enthusiastically joined in singing it at students' dinners, and have
been impressed by it in an unemotional and academic way. In peace
times one feels that it is easily the greatest of national anthems,
but fails to realize that it is primarily a battle song. This morning
for the first time I heard it sung as such, and as such shall forever
remember it. I was walking down the Rue de Sevres toward the Boulevard
Montparnasse, hoping to pick up a stray taxicab which would carry me
to the Embassy. Suddenly, and with startling abruptness, I was brought
to a full stop by a wave of sharp, staccato vocal sound. Wave beat
upon wave,--a great volume of male voices shouting in unison. There
was something so strange, so startling, and so appalling in their
quality that, without comprehending what was coming, a shiver ran up
my spine. The sound swelled and came nearer,