The excellent book, “Rites Of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age”—which uses this infamous incident as a jumping-off point from which to explore Modernity as an incipient artistic and social phenomenon that accelerates during the interwar period—concludes that this account of the crowd’s reaction was, at the very least, highly embellished, and not dissimilar to tall tales about crowds fleeing from the Lumière brothers’ image of a train bearing down upon them. But since these stories are contemporary to the events, they do nevertheless tell us something important about the spirit of the age.