3
There was no wild outbreak of Jingo fever, no demonstrations of blood-lust against Germany in Paris or any town of France, on that first day of August, when the people waited for the fateful decision which, if it were for war, would call every able-bodied man to the colours and arrest all the activities of a nation's normal life, and demand a dreadful sacrifice in blood and tears. There was only a sense of stupefaction which seemed to numb the intelligence of men so that they could not reason with any show of logic, or speak of this menace without incoherence, but thrust back the awful possibility with one word, uttered passionately and repeated a thousand times a day: "Incroyable!"
This word was dinned in my ears. I caught the sound of it as I walked along the boulevards. It would come like a refrain at the end of sentences spoken by little groups of men and women sitting outside the cafés and reading every issue of those innumerable newspapers which flung out editions at every hour. It was the answer I had from men of whom I tried to get a clue to the secret movements of diplomacy, and an answer to that question of war or peace. "C'est incroyable!" They found it hard to believe—they would not believe—that without any provocation from France, without any challenge, Germany would deliberately, force this war upon the Triple Entente and make a bloody shambles of European civilization. Beneath this incredulity, this stupefaction, there was among most of the Frenchmen whom I personally encountered a secret dread that France was unready for the great ordeal of war and that its outbreak would find her divided by political parties, inefficient in organization, corrupt in some of her Government departments. The Socialists and Syndicalists who had fought against the three years' service might refuse to march. Only a few months before a deputy had hinted at grave scandals in the provisioning and equipment of the army.
The history of 1870, with its awful revelations of disorganization and unreadiness was remembered now and lay heavy upon the hearts of those educated Frenchmen who, standing outside the political arena, distrust all politicians, having but little faith in their honesty or their ability. Who could tell whether France—the new France she had been called—would rise above her old weaknesses and confront the peril of this war with a strong, pure, and undivided spirit?
5
On August 1 there was a run on one of the banks. I passed its doors and saw them besieged by thousands of middle-class men and women drawn up in a long queue waiting very quietly—with a strange quietude for any crowd in Paris—to withdraw the savings of a lifetime or the capital of their business houses. There were similar crowds outside other banks, and on the faces of these people there was a look of brooding fear, as though all that they had fought and struggled for, the reward of all their petty economies and meannesses, and shifts and tricks, and denials of self-indulgences and starvings of soul might be suddenly snatched from them and leave them beggared. A shudder went through one such crowd when a young man came to speak to them from the steps of the bank. It was a kind of shuddering sigh, followed by loud murmurings, and here and there angry protests. The cashiers had been withdrawn from their desks and cheques could not be paid.
"We are ruined already!" said a woman. "This war will take all our money! Oh, my God!"
She made her way through the crowd with a fixed white face and burning eyes.
6
It was strange how in a day all gold disappeared from Paris. I could not see the glint of it anywhere, unless I drew it from my own purse. Even silver was very scarce and everybody was trying to cash notes, which were refused by the shopkeepers. When I put one of them down on a table at the Café Tourtel the waiter shook his head and said, "La petite monnaie, s'il vous plaît!" At another place where I put down a gold piece the waiter seized it as though it were a rare and wonderful thing, and then gave me all my change in paper, made up of new five franc notes issued by the Government. In the evening an official notice was posted on the walls prohibiting the export of grain and flour. People stared at it and said, "That means war!" Another sign of coming events, more impressive to the imagination of the Parisian, was the sudden dwindling in size of the evening newspapers. They were reduced to two sheets, and in some cases to a single broadside, owing to the possibility of a famine in paper if war broke out and cut off the supplies of Paris while the railways were being used for the mobilization of troops.
7
The city was very quiet and outwardly as calm as on any day in August. But beneath this normal appearance of things there was a growing anxiety and people's nerves were so on edge that any sudden sound would make a man start on his chair on the terrasse outside the café restaurant. Paris was afraid of itself. What uproar or riot or criminal demonstration might not burst suddenly into this tranquillity? There were evil elements lurking in the low quarters. Apaches and anarchists might be inflamed with the madness of blood which excites men in time of war. The socialists and syndicalists might refuse to fight, and fight in maintaining their refusal. Some political crime might set all those smouldering passions on fire and make a hell in the streets. So people waited and watched the crowds and listened to the pulse-beat of Paris.
The sharp staccato of revolver shots heard in the rue Montmartre on the night of July 31 caused a shudder to pass through the city, as though they were the signal for a criminal plot which might destroy France by dividing it while the enemy was on the frontier.
I did not hear those shots but only the newspaper reports which followed them almost as loudly in the soul of Paris. And yet it was only the accidental meeting of a friend which diverted my attention of dining in the Croissant Restaurant in which the crime took place at the very hour when I should have been there. Some years before in Paris, when France was in the throes of a railway strike which developed almost to the verge of revolution, I had often gone to the Croissant at two, three or four in the morning, because it had police privileges to keep open all night for the comfort of journalists. Other night birds had found this roost—ladies who sleep by day, and some of the queer adventurers of the city which never goes to bed. One night I had come into the midst of a strange company—the inner circle of Parisian anarchists who were celebrating a victory over French law. Their white faces had eyes like live coals. They thrust long thin fingers through shaggy hair and spoke passionate orations nose to nose. Their sluttish women shrieked with mirth and gave their kisses to the leader of the gang, who had the face of Christ as painted by Ary Scheffer.
It was in this interesting place, on the very velvet cushions where I used to sit to watch the company, that Jaurès was killed on the eve of the war. The veteran orator of French socialism, the man who could stir the passions of the mob—as I had seen more than once—so that at his bidding they would declare war against all the powers of Government, was struck down as he sat with his back to an open window divided from the street by a thin curtain. The young assassin—a patriot he called himself—had been excited to an hysteria of hate for a man who had tried to weaken the military power of France by opposing the measure for a three years' service. It was the madness of war which had touched his brain, and although Jaurès had called upon the Socialists of France to march as one man in defence of "La Patrie," this young neurasthenic made him the first victim of that enormous sacrifice of blood which has since reeked up to God. Jaurès, an honest man, perhaps, in spite of all his theatrical appeals to mob passion—honest at least in his desire to make life more tolerable for the sweated workers of France—was mortally wounded by those shots through the window blind, and the crimson cushions of his seat were dyed with deeper stains.
8
For twenty-four hours France was scared by the murder. It seemed possible that the crime might let loose a tide of passion among the followers of the Socialist leader. Placards were hastily posted on the walls by the military governor of Paris professing abhorrence of the assassination of a great Frenchman, promising a just punishment of the crime, and calling upon the people to remain calm in this great national crisis which would decide the destiny of France.
The appeal was not challenged. By a strange irony of fate the death of Jaurès strengthened the Government which he bad attacked throughout his life, and the dead body of the man of strife became, on its way to the grave, the symbol of a united France, of obedience to its laws, and of a martial fervour which in the old days of rebellion he had ridiculed and denounced.