At 11 on the 11th day of the 11th month, they stopped fighting. France has had 1561 days of it – 4 years and 100 days. Altogether it has lasted 1564 days. And from the avidity with which the enemy sought and seized a most severe peace …[?]
So for thirty-six days they’ll stop battering one another.
It was a great day in Paris. They went wild, in fact they’re still wild, and we expect them to be for a week or so. That’s the Latin of it. I can never describe the thing to you. There is a “je ne sais quoi” – an indefinable something – in the French blood that makes this people peculiarly fitted to commemorate such an event fittingly. It seems to combine a keen sense of the dramatic with a faculty for complete abandon to joy.
It is more than just happiness for the French – it’s joy. Can you imagine the great open Place de la Concorde full of captured cannon, machine guns, grenade throwers, tanks, aeroplanes; the great statues with a specially cheering mob before the Strasbourg statue; and the crowd! There must have been a hundred thousand people.
When America celebrates it splits into a hundred or a thousand little fetes. One man gets drunk, another dances, another goes to a show, a fourth parades the streets. Here it’s all one grand affair – everyone does everything. All the boulevards and Places were alive with mobs parading, singing and laughing. Lots of soldiers – British, French and American. Everywhere and on everybody were French and American flags – I think more American than anything else. Just a case of the lid being off – a complete abandon to the day, without any civil or military restrictions.
Next post November 14
Letters from Sidney Friend During The Great War 