May 14th.
Nancy, the most beautiful town in France, has never been as
beautiful as now. Coming back to it last evening from a round of
ruins one felt as if the humbler Sisters sacrificed to spare it were
pleading with one not to forget them in the contemplation of its
dearly-bought perfection.
The last time I looked out on the great architectural setting of the
Place Stanislas was on a hot July evening, the evening of the
National Fete. The square and the avenues leading to it
swarmed with people, and as darkness fell the balanced lines of
arches and palaces sprang out in many coloured light. Garlands of
lamps looped the arcades leading into the Place de la Carriere,
peacock-coloured fires flared from the Arch of Triumph, long curves
of radiance beat like wings over the thickets of the park, the
sculptures of the fountains, the brown-and-gold foliation of Jean
Damour's great gates; and under this roofing of light was the murmur
of a happy crowd carelessly celebrating the tradition of
half-forgotten victories.
Now, at sunset, all life ceases in Nancy and veil after veil of
silence comes down on the deserted Place and its empty perspectives.
Last night by nine the few lingering lights in the streets had been
put out, every window was blind, and the moonless night lay over the
city like a canopy of velvet. Then, from some remote point, the arc
of a search-light swept the sky, laid a fugitive pallor on darkened
palace-fronts, a gleam of gold on invisible gates, trembled across
the black vault and vanished, leaving it still blacker. When we came
out of the darkened restaurant on the corner of the square, and the
iron curtain of the entrance had been hastily dropped on us, we
stood in such complete night that it took a waiter's friendly hand
to guide us to the curbstone. Then, as we grew used to the darkness,
we saw it lying still more densely under the colonnade of the Place
de la Carriere and the clipped trees beyond. The ordered masses of
architecture became august, the spaces between them immense, and the
black sky faintly strewn with stars seemed to overarch an enchanted
city. Not a footstep sounded, not a leaf rustled, not a breath of
air drew under the arches. And suddenly, through the dumb night, the
sound of the cannon began.
May 14th.
Luncheon with the General Staff in an old bourgeois house of a
little town as sleepy as "Cranford." In the warm walled gardens
everything was blooming at once: laburnums, lilacs, red hawthorn,
Banksia roses and all the pleasant border plants that go with box
and lavender. Never before did the flowers answer the spring
roll-call with such a rush! Upstairs, in the Empire bedroom which
the General has turned into his study, it was amusingly incongruous
to see the sturdy provincial furniture littered with war-maps,
trench-plans, aeroplane photographs and all the documentation of
modern war. Through the windows bees hummed, the garden rustled, and
one felt, close by, behind the walls of other gardens, the
untroubled continuance of a placid and orderly bourgeois life.
We started early for Mousson on the Moselle, the ruined
hill-fortress that gives its name to the better-known town at its
foot. Our road ran below the long range of the "Grand Couronne," the
line of hills curving southeast from Pont-a-Mousson to St.
Nicolas du Port. All through this pleasant broken country the battle
shook and swayed last autumn; but few signs of those days are left
except the wooden crosses in the fields. No troops are visible, and
the pictures of war that made the Argonne so tragic last March are
replaced by peaceful rustic scenes. On the way to Mousson the road
is overhung by an Italian-looking village clustered about a
hill-top. It marks the exact spot at which, last August, the German
invasion was finally checked and flung back; and the Muse of History
points out that on this very hill has long stood a memorial shaft
inscribed: _Here, in the year 362, Jovinus defeated the Teutonic
hordes._
A little way up the ascent to Mousson we left the motor behind a bit
of rising ground. The road is raked by the German lines, and stray
pedestrians (unless in a group) are less liable than a motor to have
a shell spent on them. We climbed under a driving grey sky which
swept gusts of rain across our road. In the lee of the castle we
stopped to look down at the valley of the Moselle, the slate roofs
of Pont-a-Mousson and the broken bridge which once linked
together the two sides of the town. Nothing but the wreck of the
bridge showed that we were on the edge of war. The wind was too high
for firing, and we saw no reason for believing that the wood just
behind the Hospice roof at our feet was seamed with German trenches
and bristling with guns, or that from every slope across the valley
the eye of the cannon sleeplessly glared. But there the Germans
were, drawing an iron ring about three sides of the watch-tower; and
as one peered through an embrasure of the ancient walls one
gradually found one's self re-living the sensations of the little
mediaeval burgh as it looked out on some earlier circle of
besiegers. The longer one looked, the more oppressive and menacing
the invisibility of the foe became. "_There_ they are--and
_there_--and _there._" We strained our eyes obediently, but saw only
calm hillsides, dozing farms. It was as if the earth itself were the
enemy, as if the hordes of evil were in the clods and grass-blades.
Only one conical hill close by showed an odd artificial patterning,
like the work of huge ants who had scarred it with criss-cross
ridges. We were told that these were French trenches, but they
looked much more like the harmless traces of a prehistoric camp.
Suddenly an officer, pointing to the west of the trenched hill said:
"Do you see that farm?" It lay just below, near the river, and so
close that good eyes could easily have discerned people or animals
in the farm-yard, if there had been any; but the whole place seemed
to be sleeping the sleep of bucolic peace. "_They are there_," the
officer said; and the innocent vignette framed by my field-glass
suddenly glared back at me like a human mask of hate. The loudest
cannonade had not made "them" seem as real as that!...
At this point the military lines and the old political frontier
everywhere overlap, and in a cleft of the wooded hills that conceal
the German batteries we saw a dark grey blur on the grey horizon. It
was Metz, the Promised City, lying there with its fair steeples and
towers, like the mystic banner that Constantine saw upon the sky...
Through wet vineyards and orchards we scrambled down the hill to the
river and entered Pont-a-Mousson. It was by mere
meteorological good luck that we got there, for if the winds had
been asleep the guns would have been awake, and when they wake poor
Pont-a-Mousson is not at home to visitors. One understood why
as one stood in the riverside garden of the great Premonstratensian
Monastery which is now the hospital and the general asylum of the
town. Between the clipped limes and formal borders the German shells
had scooped out three or four "dreadful hollows," in one of which,
only last week, a little girl found her death; and the facade of the
building is pock-marked by shot and disfigured with gaping holes.
Yet in this precarious shelter Sister Theresia, of the same
indomitable breed as the Sisters of Clermont and Gerbeviller, has
gathered a miscellaneous flock of soldiers wounded in the trenches,
civilians shattered by the bombardment, eclopes, old women and
children: all the human wreckage of this storm-beaten point of the
front. Sister Theresia seems in no wise disconcerted by the fact
that the shells continually play over her roof. The building is
immense and spreading, and when one wing is damaged she picks up her
proteges and trots them off, bed and baggage, to another. "_Je
promene mes malades_," she said calmly, as if boasting of the varied
accommodation of an ultra-modern hospital, as she led us through
vaulted and stuccoed galleries where caryatid-saints look down in
plaster pomp on the rows of brown-blanketed pallets and the long
tables at which haggard eclopes were enjoying their evening soup.
