Most of the women one met were in black, almost every one wearing some sort of mourning, for there was scarcely a family in France that had not already paid its toll of life, many several times over. But the faces of these women in black were calm and dry-eyed: there were few outward signs of grief other than the mourning clothes, just an enduring silence. "The time for our mourning is not yet," a Frenchman said whose immediate family circle had given seven of its members. With some, one felt, the time for weeping would never come: they had transmuted their personal woe into devotion to others....
There was little loitering and gazing in at shop windows, few shoppers in the empty stores these days. Everybody seemed to have something important that must be done at once and had best be done in sober silence. Even the wounded had lost the habit of telling their troubles. Doctors and nurses related as one of the interesting phenomena in the hospitals this dislike of talking about what they had been through, even among the common soldiers. Most likely their experiences had been too horrible for gossip. There was a conspiracy of silence, a tacit recognition of the futility of words, and almost never a complaint! One day a soldier walked a block to give me a direction, and in reply to my inquiry pointed to his lower jaw where a deep wound was hidden in a thick beard. "A ball," he said simply. It was the second wound he had received, and that night he was going back to his _dépôt_. For they went back again and again into that hell so close to this peaceful Paris, and what happened there was too bad for words. It must be endured in silence.
There were not many troops on the streets,--at least French soldiers and officers; there was a surprising number of English of all branches of the service and a few Belgians. The French were either at the front or in their _dépôts_ outside the city. On the Fourteenth of July, when the remains of Rouget de Lisle, the author of the _Marseillaise_, were brought to the Invalides, a few companies of city guards on horseback and of colonial troops in soiled uniforms formed the escort down the Champs Élysées behind the ancient gun carriage that bore the poet's ashes. There were many wounded soldiers, hopelessly crippled or convalescing, in the theaters, at the cafés, and on the streets. As the weeks passed they seemed to become more numerous, though the authorities had taken pains to keep Paris comparatively empty of the wounded. One met them hobbling down the Élysées under the shade of the chestnut trees, in the metro, at the cafés, the legless and armless, also the more horrible ones whose faces had been shot awry. They were so young, so white-faced, with life's long road ahead to be traveled, thus handicapped! There was something wistful often in their silent eyes.