It was menaced, but it escaped. Perhaps no city
was ever in acuter peril; it escaped by a miracle, but it did escape. It
escaped because tens of thousands of soldiers in thousands of taxi-
cabs advanced more rapidly than any soldiers could be expected to
advance. "The population of Paris has revolted and is hurrying to
ask mercy from us!" thought the reconnoitring simpletons in Taubes,
when they noted beneath them the incredible processions of taxi-
cabs going north. But what they saw was the Sixth Army, whose
movement changed the campaign, and perhaps the whole course
of history.
"A great misfortune has overtaken us," said a German officer the
next day. It was true. Greater than he suspected.
The horror of what might have happened, the splendour of what did
happen, mingle in the awed mind as you look over the city from the
balcony. The city escaped. And the event seems vaster and more
sublime than the mind can bear.
The streets of Paris have now a perpetual aspect of Sunday
morning; only the sound of church-bells is lacking. A few of the taxi-
cabs have come back; but all the auto-buses without exception are
away behind the front. So that the traffic is forced underground,
where the railways are manned by women. A horse-bus, dug up out
of the past, jogs along the most famous boulevard in the world like a
country diligence, with a fat, laughing peasant-woman clinging to its
back-step and collecting fare-moneys into the immense pocket of
her black apron.
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