A curfew regulation is now in force in Paris. No one is allowed in the streets after eight o'clock. Whoever is found out later than that hour is promptly conducted to his domicile by the first policeman he meets.
I received a cablegram tonight explaining that there is at the moment no means of forwarding money from New York to Paris. This makes my financial situation awkward, as I now have only three hundred francs. The worst of it is that one cannot even resort to the expedient of borrowing, because all one's friends are suffering a like stringency.
Today is, officially, the "third day of mobilization." From now on France will live not by calendar, but by mobilization, days. One speaks not of "Sunday, August 2d," but of the "first day of mobilization." Neither days of the week nor of the month exist any longer. All government decrees, railroad schedules, and military orders are dated by the new era. Events follow a schedule which has long since been prepared. When mobilization is announced the nation turns away from its everyday life and from the world's calendar, and starts a carefully rehearsed set of operations executed according to an arbitrary schedule. One dimly remembers that if it were "peace time" today would be Tuesday.
One sees everywhere on the sidewalk little knots of people talking in low, troubled voices, and each time just as their conversation is well started they are interrupted by a policeman who reminds them that it is not permitted to _s'attrouper_ in the streets and that they must move on.
Everywhere one sees speeding taxicabs, each containing a young soldier, his family, and two or three bundles. The young man usually wears a brand new uniform. The women of the family are invariably weeping quietly as if to say: "I cannot help crying, because I am a woman, but everything is all right and just as it should be!" When the father is of the party, he has a calm face and sits beside his son with his arm around the son's shoulders, and always the taxi speeds madly, so that each time one gets only the most fleeting glimpse of the family within.
There are very few soldiers left in Paris,--not a fifth as many as usual; those that one does see are most of them driving heavily-loaded army wagons and appear most disgusted with the unheroic service. Auto-busses have completely disappeared from the streets, and this is a great inconvenience; they are all at Versailles being converted into meat wagons or ambulances. All the fast private automobiles are requisitioned for the army, and one sees them tearing along vying in speed with the flying taxis, each one driven by a sapper with another sapper in the footman's place, while one or two officers sit calmly behind, trying to smoke cigarettes in spite of the wind.
