... if the armistice is signed, a salvo of cannon from the invalides at eleven o’clock will announce the end of the war.
the clock hands crept slowly past ten and lagged intolerably thereafter. the rapid beating of your heart, telling off the minutes, brought eleven finally very near. then the clock, your heart, all the world, seemed to stand still. the great moment was there. would the announcing cannon speak? such a terrible silence as the world kept during that supreme moment of suspense! it was the quintessence of all the moral torture of four nightmare years.
and then ... like a shock within your own body it came, the first solemn proclamation of the cannon, shaking the windows, the houses, the very sky, with its news. the war was over. the accursed guns had ceased tearing to pieces our husbands and our sons and our fathers.
[140]of all the hundreds of thousands of women who heard those guns, i think there was not one who did not feel instantly, scalding on her cheeks, the blessed tears—tears of joy! she had forgotten that there could be tears of joy. the horrible weight on the soul that had grown to be a part of life dissolved away in that assuaging flood; the horrible constriction around the heart loosened. we wept with all our might; we poured out once for all the old bitterness, the old horror. we felt sanity coming back, and faith and even hope, that forgotten possession of the old days.
when the first tears of deliverance had passed, and your knees had stopped shaking, and your heart no longer beat suffocatingly in your throat, why, then every one felt one common imperious desire, to leave the little cramping prison of his own walls, to escape out of the selfish circle of his own joy, and to mingle his thanksgiving with that of all his fellows, to make himself physically, as he felt spiritually, at one with rejoicing humanity.
and we all rushed out into the streets.
[141]i think there never can have been such a day before, such a day of pure thanksgiving and joy for every one. for the emotion was so intense that, during the priceless hours of that first day, it admitted no other. human hearts could hold no more than that great gladness. the dreadful past, the terrible problems of the future, were not. we lived and drew our breath only in the knowledge that “firing had ceased at eleven o’clock that morning,” and that those who had fought as best they could for the right had conquered. you saw everywhere supreme testimony to the nobility of the moment, women in black, with bits of bright-colored tricolor pinned on their long black veils, with at last a smile, the most wonderful of all smiles, in their dimmed eyes. they were marching with the others in the streets; every one was marching with every one else, arm in arm, singing:
allons, enfants de la patrie,
le jour de gloire est arrivé!
the houses echoed to those words, repeated and repeated by every band of jubilant men and[142] women and children who swept by, waving flags and shouting:
come, children of our country,
the day of glory is here!
every group had at its head a permissionnaire or two in field uniform who had been pounced upon as the visible emblem of victory, kissed, embraced, covered with flowers, and set in the front rank to carry the largest flag. sometimes there walked beside these soldiers working women with sleeping babies in their arms, sometimes old men in frock coats with ribbons in their buttonholes, sometimes light-hearted, laughing little munition workers still in their black aprons, but with tricolored ribbons twisted in their hair, sometimes elegantly dressed ladies, sometimes women in long mourning veils, sometimes ragged old beggars, sometimes a cab filled with crippled soldiers waving their crutches—but all with the same face of steadfast, glowing jubilee. during those few blessed hours there was no bitterness, no evil arrogance, no revengeful[143] fury. any one who saw all that afternoon those thousands and thousands of human faces all shining with the same exaltation can never entirely despair of his fellows again, knowing them to be capable of that pure joy.
the day of glory has come.
the crowd seemed to be merely washing back and forth in surging waves of thanksgiving, up and down the streets aimlessly, carrying flowers to no purpose but to celebrate their happiness. but once you were in it, singing and marching with the others, you felt an invisible current bearing you steadily, irresistibly, in one direction; and soon, as you marched, and grew nearer the unknown goal, you heard another shorter, more peremptory, rhythm mingling with the longer shout, repeated over and over:
allons, enfants de la patrie,
le jour de gloire est arrivé!
now people were beginning to shout: “to strasbourg! to strasbourg! to strasbourg! to strasbourg!” then you knew that you[144] were being swept along to the place de la concorde, to salute the statue of strasbourg, freed from her forty years of mourning and slavery.
the crowd grew denser and denser as it approached that heart of paris; and the denser it grew the higher flamed the great fire of rejoicing, mounting up almost visibly to the quiet gray skies:
come, children of our country,
the day of glory is here!
“to strasbourg! to strasbourg! to strasbourg!”
no evil epithets hurled at the defeated enemy, not one, not one in all those long hours of shouting out what was in the heart; no ugly effigies, no taunting cries, no mention even of the enemy—instead a fresh outburst of rejoicing at the encounter with a long procession of belgians, marching arm in arm, carrying belgian flags and pealing out like trumpets the noble braban?onne! we made way for them with respectful admiration, we stopped our song to listen to[145] theirs, we let them pass, waving our hats, our handkerchiefs, cheering them, pressing flowers upon them, snatching at their hands for a clasp as they went by, blessing them for their constancy and courage, sharing their relief till our hearts were like to burst!
we fell in behind them and at once had to separate again to allow the passage of a huge camion, bristling with american soldiers, heaped up in a great pyramid of brown. how every one cheered them, a different shout, with none of the poignant undercurrent of sympathy for pain that had greeted the belgian exiles. these brave, lovable, boyish crusaders come from across the sea for a great ideal, who had been ready to give all, but who had been blessedly spared the last sacrifice—it was a rollicking shout which greeted them! they represented the youth, the sunshine; they were loved and laughed at and acclaimed by the crowd as they passed, waving their caps, leaning over the side to shake the myriad hands stretched up to them, catching at the flowers flung at them, shouting out some song, perhaps a college cheer, judging[146] by the professionally frantic gestures of a cheer leader, grinding his teeth and waving his arms wildly to exhort them to more volume of sound. whatever it was, it was quite inaudible in the general uproar, the only coherent accent of which was the swelling cry repeated till it was like an elemental sound of nature.
the day of glory has arrived.
now a group of english soldiers overtook us, carrying a great, red, glorious english flag, adding some hearty, inaudible marching song to the tumult. as they passed, a poilu in our band sprang forward, seized one of the anglo-saxons in his arms, and kissed him resoundingly on both cheeks. then there was laughter, and shouts and handshakings and more embracing, and they too vanished away in the waves of the great river of humanity flowing steadily, rapidly toward the statue of the lost city whose loss had meant the triumph of unscrupulous force, whose restitution meant the righting of an old wrong in the name of justice. we were almost there[147] now; the huge open place opened out before us.
now we had come into it, and our songs for an instant were cut short by one great cry of astonishment. as far as the eye could reach, the vast public square was black with the crowd, and brilliant with waving flags. a band up on the terrace of the tuileries, stationed between the captured german airplanes, flashed in the air the yellow sheen of their innumerable brass instruments, evidently playing with all their souls, but not a sound of their music reached our ears, so deafening was the burst of shouting and singing as the crowd saw its goal, the high statue of the lost city, buried in heaped-up flowers and palms, a triumphant wreath of gold shadowing the eyes which so long had looked back to france from exile.
ah, what an ovation we gave her! then we shouted as we had not done before, the great primitive, inarticulate cry of rejoicing that bursts from the heart too full. we shook out our flags high over our heads, as we passed, we cast our flowers up on the pedestal, we were[148] swept along by the current—we were the current ourselves!
at the base of the statue a group of white-haired alsatians stood, men and women, with quivering lips and trembling hands. theirs was the honor to arrange the flowers which, tossed too hastily by the eager bearers, fell to the ground.
as they stooped for them, and reached high to find yet one more corner not covered with blooms, a splendid, fair-haired lad, sturdy and tall, with the field outfit of the french soldier heavy on his back, pushed his way through the crowd.
he had in his hand a little bouquet—white and red roses, and forget-me-nots. his eyes were fixed on the statue. he did not see the old men and women there to receive the flowers. he pressed past them and with his own young hands laid his humble offering at the feet of the recovered city. he looked up at the statue and his lips moved. he could not have been more unconscious if he had been entirely alone in an alsatian forest. the expression of his beautiful[149] young face was such that a hush of awe fell on those who saw him.
an old woman in black took his hand in hers and said: “you are from alsace?”
“i escaped from strasbourg to join the french army,” he said, “and all my family are there.” his eyes brimmed, his chin quivered.
the old woman had a noble gesture of self-forgetting humanity. she took him in her arms and kissed him on both cheeks. “you are my son,” she said.
they all crowded around him, taking his hand. “and my brother!” “and mine!” “and mine!”
the tears ran down their cheeks.
