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de veau, strawberries, Kung '04, coffee, liqueurs, cigars, cigarettes. No butter, cream, or sugar. Otherwise everything the heart of man can desire.

Thus the meal is finished.

VI

The scene changes. An immense round building packed from floor to ceiling, every Allied and many neutral nationalities crushed into that auditorium and those boxes, all the crème of vice and the fine art of sin to be found in the world compressed between those circular plush and gilded walls and that high dome, all the dancing bubbles of life, all the drunken frolics of fancy boiled together in that astounding cauldron of a music-hall. An atmosphere pungent with cigars, stale scent, and human beings. Alternate spasms of violent mirth and equally violent emotion ripple over the crowd like wind on the wheat-field in autumn. A dazzling stage crowded with human figures, footlights, elaborate scenery in garish colours, a lantern shooting at the stage violet beams. Women, all women, in all colours, in many patterns, wheeling, weaving figures, interweaving, streaks, a veritable kaleidoscope, ogling, grinning, smirking, how fatuously, how complacently! Hush! A pause. A stillness. The entr'acte. The dim and swelling music and a frail distant voice singing something-all alone, pallid and weak-some song that is familiar: idiotically sentimental words set to a tune at once wistful and full of memories. Music that plays upon the mind, waking unsuspected chords, stirring pulses long since dead. "Roses of Picardy," "A Broken Doll "these songs are old, but in their familiar strains and in the upraising of the frail and distant voice this bizarre study in plush and gilt and turgid humanity fades into the memory of bygone things. The lights are on again, the marionettes are dancing

Like strange mechanical grotesques

Making fantastic arabesques,

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mincing and marking time in a whirl of idiotic painted faces and gorgeous bewildering costumes.

VII

The curtain has fallen. It is the interval. And all the motley crowd promenades in couples, in threes, fours, and fives, some arm in arm, some rollicking round the great foyer of the music-hall. In nine months, in nine years the first sink-hole of Europe has changed but little. It is a temple consecrated to the Daughters of Joy. All the world of Lola and Renée are there (in boxes), all the world of Ninette, Gabys, and Yvonne (in boxes), and the

world beneath theirs, and the underworld again. All the twisted and saturnine faces; all the flabby, gross, and sensual faces; all the expressions of vice and malice, of cruelty and evil; all features seared by passion, painted, rouged, wrought by the devil; all meanness, furtiveness, sordid craving, and grasping lust are written there. Never a woman's passing face-and there are hundreds--never a pair of woman's eyes, but on them are stamped this nameless sign, plainer than the mark of Cain. How expressive of evil, more expressive than a man's by far, is a woman's face! Paint, powder, and rouge, these cannot hide it-nor youth nor

age.

And over all, among the palms, among the little tables, in the pale blue half-light, in the yearning, quasi-romantic music of the band--they are playing a pathetically banal London air, Hullo, my dearie "at the back of it all is a vast weariness.

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In

this nightmare procession of faces one can discern, not only the sins of the whole world, but its pitifulness, its suffering, and its retribution. Look into the sad eyes-for among the Daughters of Joy there is no mirth--and pray that the Bon Dieu, gazing down from above, may see there but the weariness of self-willed, passionate children who have played too long and too well.

Some call it Bohemia and some the world of Sodom and Gomorrah. No matter; at this same hour in London, Berlin, Vienna, New York, the pleasure-seekers are diligent at their selfimposed task-always searching, never resting. It is the world that has revolved in its changeless never-ending circle since the beginning of Time--this restless world of the pleasure-seekers-a race eternal, like the gipsies and the Jews.

And over that world war itself has no power.

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Snatches of conversation come out of the crowd. A man's voice says:

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Well, chérie, what'd you do if the Boche came day after to-morrow?"

A girl's voice, impatiently:

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Oh, what do I care? Let 'em come!"

Outside it is black night. In the centre of Paris the Eiffel Tower soars up into the sky. From it you may see the flickering of the guns, the rising and falling of the star-lights where, towards Compiègne, the German armies lie.

VIII

After dawn the Boulevard Montmartre is peopled with ghosts. They walk singly and in couples, they walk noisily with men, they slide by in the shadows peering up at you, they loiter under street lamps and stroll aimlessly in front of you, they sidle round street corners and dart out of the dim recesses of shop doors. And if

they see a man alone they creep up beside him, whisper to him, pluck him by the elbow, even call out to him at a distance of several yards. To one from the trenches, it is a strange experience, this great formless, nameless company of spirits--pursuing, importuning--here, there, and everywhere so many and so hungry.

It would seem they steal out with the shadows, these ghosts, swarm out to meet the pleasure-seekers at the hour when the lamps are lit and the curtain of mystery descends upon Paris. Imagination calls a man to raise this curtain, to investigate this mystery. For while the dim streets are restless and the taxis rattle by, and the tide of subterranean life runs strong, it is impossible to go to bed. . . . Get a breath of God's good airclear away the cobwebs from the fevered brain!

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So the rickety fiacre rattles slowly down the Rue de Castiglione, under the great archway of the Tuileries, through a courtyard, across the Pont des Beaux-Arts which spans the Seine. Along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, past the listening statue of Voltaire. How silent and dark the river, how immense the overpowering mass of the Louvre on the farther side! Then into a labyrinth of old and narrow streets, tortuous lanes between high walls, vast buildings, courts and alley-ways, many churches. It is impossible to recognize anything. We are lost. No, the driver knowsthat old man who must have driven a lifetime through these streets. Ah, we're in the Quartier Latin! And there is the Sorbonne, and there, after more tortuous windings, the dim rounded shape of the Panthéon seen dimly against a lightening sky.

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The chimes of Notre Dame strike midnight.

Midnight, and the world asleep! A pale moon gazing down upon Paris-and loneliness and the screaming of cats. The pleasure-seekers have vanished back into the shadows, so have the puppets and the ghosts. A nameless figure rustles by hugging the wall like one ashamed. A light burns in some student's window-some student poring over his books or keeping late company in his little attic. Otherwise the city sleeps, and, sleeping, waits.

Ah! This Paris! It is like a woman in its mystery, its waywardness, and its passion; its pride and beauty and its joy of life; its comedies and tears, its magnificence and wickedness; its tremendous past and eternal future; its laughter at the destinies of men.

WILFRID HERBERT GORE

RETROSPECT AND
REMINISCENCE

I. DIPLOMATIC DIARISTS

I FEEL tempted to celebrate my twenty-five years' editorship and ownership of the National Review by perpetrating an indiscretion which may not be thought entirely inappropriate to the fourth anniversary of Britain's entrance into the war, and which in any case will, I hope, be forgiven by those whose names are taken in vain. The Indiscretion will be found at the end of this article. I do not think it can conceivably injure any of the individuals involved, while it may help to throw a further sidelight on those terrible hours of August 1, 2, and 3, 1914, when the fate of England literally trembled in the balance, and with our fate that of European Civilization, as is nowadays universally recognized. In being indiscreet one sins in good company and but follows the distinguished example of members of a profession which had hitherto made a tradition of mystery. Thanks to them the world already knows infinitely more about the origin of this war than about the genesis of any previous war, because for the first time jealously guarded diplomatic secrets that have usually remained buried for one or two generations after the event, have been rightly and wisely disclosed by the actual actors, whose testimony is convincing, because they write and speak of what they know and have no interest except in telling us the whole truth.

It is not the least of the services that the United States have rendered at this juncture that her Ambassadors have broken the conspiracy of silence concerning episodes behind the scenes as entirely unsuited to these democratic days when sound national policies so largely depend on informed and instructed public opinion. But it is not only American diplomats such as Mr. Gerard, who represented the Great Republic in Berlin before and during the war, and Mr. Morgenthau, who filled a like office in Constantinople, who have lifted the veil concealing the devilish policy of Potsdam in deliberately plunging the world into this

blood-bath. We had already had the illuminating impressions of Baron Beyens-Belgian Minister in Berlin, and until the other day Belgian Foreign Minister--while strangest of all revelations is the Memorandum of Prince Lichnowsky (late German Ambassador in London) written, we are told, as a private vindication for the benefit of his family and friends, and leaking out through the "indiscretion" of a member of the Great German General Staff, who we may be sure acted in this, as in all other matters, under superior orders. Whatever the motive of this publication, whether it was part of some super-subtle "Peace Offensive to encourage our Lansdowners to respond to the enemy's Lichnowskys, whether it was merely the aim of the Prussian military oligarchy to mark their contempt for German diplomats who were afraid of responsibility for the war made in Berlin, or was part of a political design to make British statesmanship contemptible in the eyes of the Fatherland, and thus raise moral on the German home front, is immaterial. Prince Lichnowsky and his enemies of the General Staff-if they be enemies have between them presented the Allies with an invaluable document, if only because it should put an estoppel on every Potsdam Party abroad by its convincing confirmation of the American evidence not that confirmation was needed-that the world is at war because the Powers-that-Be in Germany regarded the moment as favourable to the realization of the Pan-German programme of universal domination.

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That Germany meant mischief had been apparent to every unprejudiced student of German policy because the attitude of that country from about the year 1900 onwards was incompatible with any other theory. Unfortunately it was never easy to persuade the naturally optimistic British people of this disquieting fact, while British statesmen of all Parties were incorrigibly determined to look the other way while the cauldron was brewing. Before 1914 it was regarded as the hall-mark of "a crank to suspect the beneficent designs of Potsdam. British diplomats, who doubted the good faith of Wilhelm II, were regarded askance by the gifted amateurs who made hay of our affairs, and who infinitely preferred the agreeable advice of Lord Haldane, that every Anglo-German problem was resolvable by a judicious combination of platform slobber with the punctual payment of blackmail to Berlin, in the shape of the surrender of some vital British interest-strategic for choice. Prince Lichnowsky not unnaturally vaunts diplomatic triumphs which secured one titbit after another for the Mailed Fist. The authorized translation of his Memorandum now circulating under official auspices is prefaced by a panegyric of "the Grey policy" from the pen of Professor Gilbert Murray, indicating that the present

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