In such ways the people of Paris kept themselves from eating their hearts out in grief and anxiety.
At three o'clock in the afternoons, when the day's _communiqué_ was given out from the War Office, little groups gathered in front of the windows of certain shops where the official report was posted. They would scan the usually colorless lines in silence and turn away, as though saying to themselves,--"Not to-day--then to-morrow!" The newsless newspapers abounded in something perhaps more heartening than favorable reports from the front--an endless chronicle of bravery and devotion, of valor, heroism, and chivalry in the trench. That is what fed the anxious hearts of the waiting people, details of the large, heroic picture that France was creating so near at hand, _là-bas_.
There were few occasions for popular gatherings. The taste for "demonstrations" of any sort had gone out of the people. Sympathetic crowds met the trains from Switzerland that contained the first of the "_grands blessés_" the militarily useless wounded whom Germany at last concluded to give back to their homes. And I recall one pathetic sight which I witnessed by accident--the arrival of one of the long trains from the front bringing back the first "_permissionnaires_" those soldiers who had been given a three or four days' leave after nine months in the trenches. In front of the Gare de l'Est a great throng of women and children were kept back by rope and police, until at the appearance of the uniformed men at the exit they surged forward and sought out each her own man. There were little laughs and sobs and kisses under the flaring gas lamps of the station yard until the last _poilu_ had been claimed, and the crowd melted away into Paris.
Across the street from my hotel there was an elementary school; several times each day a buzz of children's voices rose from the leafy yard into which they were let out for their recess. Again the thin chorus of children's voices came from the schoolroom. It seemed the one completely natural thing in Paris, the one living thing unconscious of the war. Yet even the school children were learning history in a way they will never forget. In one of the provincial schools visited by an inspector, all the pupils rose as a crippled child hobbled into the schoolroom. "He suffered from the Germans," the teacher explained. "His mates always rise when he appears." A French mother walking with her little boy in one of the parks met a legless soldier, and turning to her child she said sternly, as if to teach an unforgettable lesson,--"Do you see that legless man? The _Boches_ did that--remember it!" In these ways the new generation is learning its history, and it is not likely to forget it for many years to come.