When the Cheering Stopped by Gene; Smith Page A

screamed in holy fervor to the man standing in the victoria and holding outstretched his tall hat. He went under draped flags, and bunting, and an immense electric sign: WELCOME TO WILSON. The military bands beat on their drums and the bugles sounded; the noise was lost in the roaring cheers for the man who would save France from another 1870 and another 1914. The air was filled with coats and jackets thrown aloft after the hats. A huge banner stretched across the Champs Elysées: HONOR TO WILSON THE JUST. Flowers rained down onto the First Lady, so that people could barely see her as she rode in the carriage behind her husband. The President of France looked dazed and pale; he seemed terrified almost by the emotion before him. The American Secret Service men were in a frenzyof fear for their charge, but it was impossible to do anything; the crowds were too enormous, the noise too loud, the press of bodies too great. People grew giddy; women wept as they screamed his name.
    â€œNo one ever had such cheers,” wrote the journalist William Bolitho. “I, who heard them in the streets of Paris, can never forget them in my life. I saw Foch pass, Clemenceau pass, Lloyd George, generals, returning troops, banners, but Wilson heard from his carriage something different, inhuman—or superhuman. Oh, the immovably shining, smiling man!”
    It seemed the Arc de Triomphe would fall before this cascade of sound. His carriage went under it—the first time within the memory of living man this had happened. The Premier of France said, “I do not think there has been anything like it in the history of the world.”
    Later in the day the President spoke at a luncheon, exchanging toasts with the French President: “All that I have said or tried to do has been said and done only in the attempt to faithfully express the thoughts of the American people. From the very beginning of this war the thoughts of the people of America turned toward something higher than the mere spoils of war. Their thought was directed toward the establishment of the eternal principles of right and justice.”
    That day French soldiers joined hands to drag German cannons down the street at a run; French girls screaming with laughter went along as passengers. That day the overloaded branches of a tree near the Madeleine broke and half a dozen doughboys tumbled all over the sidewalk—but it was a day when nothing could go wrong and they all jumped up unhurt and trooped away, laughing. That day Le Petit Parisien headlined: VIVE WILSON ! VIVE WILSON ! and La Liberté said Paris had given to him all its fire and all its heart. That night Paris was ablaze with illuminations and the boulevards were thronged with singing, dancing, confetti-tossing crowds.
    He went to England. French ships escorted him to mid-Channel; British craft took up the duty there. At Dover the Lord Mayor in wig and robe greeted him, and little English schoolgirls draped in American flags threw flowers in his path. In London a wintry haze hung in the air,but the flags and bunting and triumphal arches made of choice flowers, richly berried holly, and gilt golden eagles in front of Charing Cross seemed to glimmer as the guns in Hyde Park and the Tower pumped off blanks to announce his coming. A detachment of the Scots Guards was at the station, and the band of the Grenadiers, and of course the King in field marshal’s uniform. They went out over red carpets to the great high red-and-gold royal carriages drawn by beautifully groomed bays with red harness and silk on their manes and surrounded by a Sovereign’s Escort and postilions and footmen in royal livery. The people filling the Strand broke out into a roar for the man who would save England from another Continental war with its horrors of gas and mud, and they got under way, the carriages, the Royal Standard Bearer, the clattering horse escort going by Venetian masts, by the National Gallery almost hidden by