"He who is not for me is against me." There is no possible neutrality on the greater issues of life.
I shall never forget the poignant impression that Paris made on me that first morning in early June when I descended from the train at the Gare de Lyon. After a time I came to accept the new aspect of things as normal, to forget what Paris had been before the war, but as with persons so with places the first impression often gives a deeper, keener insight into character than repeated contacts. I knew that the German invasion, which had swept so close to the city in the first weeks of the war, and which after all the anxious winter months was still no farther than an hour's motor ride from Paris, must have wrought a profound change in this, the most personal of cities. One read of the scarcity of men on the streets, of the lack of cabs, of shuttered shops, of women and girls performing the ordinary tasks of men, of the ever-rising tide of convalescent wounded, etc. But no written words are able to convey the whole meaning of things: one must see with one's own eyes, must feel subconsciously the many details that go to make truth.
When the long train from Switzerland pulled into the station there were enough old men and boys to take the travelers' bags, which is not always the case these war times when every sort of worker has much more than two hands can do. There were men waiters in the station restaurant where I took my morning coffee. It is odd how quickly one scanned these protected workers with the instinctive question--"Why are you too not fighting for your country?" But if not old or decrepit, it was safe to say that these civilian workers were either women or foreigners--Greeks, Balkans, or Spanish, attracted to Paris by opportunities for employment. For the entire French nation was practically mobilized, including women and children, so much of the daily labor was done by them. The little café was full of men,--almost every one in some sort of uniform,--drinking their coffee and scanning the morning papers. Everybody in Paris seemed to read newspapers all day long,--the cabmen as they drove, the passers-by as they walked hastily on their errands, the waiters in the cafés,--and yet they told so little of what was going on _là-bas!_.... The silence in the restaurant seemed peculiarly dead. A gathering of Parisians no matter where, as I remembered, was rarely silent, a French café never. But I soon realized that one of the significant aspects of the new France since the war was its taciturnity, its silence. Almost all faces were gravely preoccupied with the national task, and whatever their own small part in it might be, it was too serious a matter to encourage chattering, gesticulating, or disputing in the pleasant Latin way.