The New York Times/1918/11/11/Paris Convinced War is Finished
PARIS CONVINCED WAR IS FINISHED
Germans Must and Will Surrender, Is Prevalent Feeling in Boulevard Throngs.
Copyright, 1918, by The New York Times Company.
Special Cable to The New York Times.
PARIS, Nov. 10.—Are the Germans manoeuvring for a further military struggle or are they prepared to surrender, no matter what the terms?
That is a question the French people are asking themselves. But putting the question apparently is more for the sake of speculative interest than because of doubt. There is remarkable unanimity in the answer to the effect the Germany must and will surrender.
The thought that is in the air all over Paris is, "The war is finished." You can feel it. You can see it in the faces in the street. It is just as tangible a thing as was the gloom last Spring and Summer, before the beginning of the great victory of July 18.
It is many weeks since things have fallen out of the sky to kill Parisians and damage property. Today things are going up, instead. I mean toy balloons. This is worth mentioning, because, if anything is symbolic of festive cheer, it is the sight of old men and women in the crowds with bunches of red and blue balloons over their shoulders to sell to the children.
There are such crowds today in the Place de la Concorde and the Champs Elysées looking at the hundreds of captured German cannon and gleefully commenting on the coming of a white flag from the armies that were so recently using those same cannon with deadly effect against the allied troops.
There are thousands of these cannon of all kinds and all calibers clustered thickly in the centre of the Place de la Concorde, where the guillotine was set up a little over a century ago, and spreading out in long lines along the Seine, in the Tuileries Gardens and up the Champs Elysées.
In one short block I counted 130 big cannon pointing at one another on opposite sides of the street.
On a smaller scale it is the same way throughout the towns all over France, where captured cannon are being given to municipalities for public squares as rewards for their good showing on Liberation Loan subscriptions.
There are no rope guards around the captured guns in the Paris streets. Children are allowed to swarm over them, play horse on them, fight imaginary battles, and monkey with the mechanism that raises and lowers the muzzles to their hearts' content.
Thousands of pairs of little breeches in Paris are no doubt streaked with rust from climbing over the cannon today. But no boy gets scolded. The war is finished, says the crowd, and the great victory is ours; nothing else matters for the moment.
More seriously there is much comment on the personnel of Germany's truce quartet. Von Winterfeld is thought as little of in Paris as a Bernstorff or von Papen would be in New York.
But inasmuch as Foch will do all the talking at the armistice conferences nobody cares much about the personality of those who bear the white flag. The development of the last few days, the Austrian surrender and the German surrender being almost taken for granted, seem to have done much to change that portion of French public opinion which was adverse to conversations between Washington and Berlin.