CHAPTER VII

ACROSS LORRAINE

LUNÉVILLE, _Tuesday, October 16th_.

One last look at the church, whose warm and lovely towers with their _motifs_ of urn and scroll and angel were shining pinkly in the morning light. Then through the door of the Hôtel de Ville, built on the site of the ancient abbey of St.-Rémy, founded in the last years of the tenth century by Folmar de Lunéville for the repose of his soul and of his wife’s, and completely done over in the eighteenth century. As I turned in at the passageway leading through to the other street, old houses on one side, and on the other plantings of holly against the church walls, I thought of the saying of the Middle Ages, “_Il fait bon vivre sous la crosse_” (“It is good to live under the bishops”), and how the peasants would come in from their hamlets, through the fields and forests, with their tithes. The monks generally springing from the people showed themselves more understanding of their wants and their miseries, and were less apt to overtax them, having fewer needs, than the lords with their wars, their ambitions, and their grandeurs.

Then one finds oneself in the garden of the Hôtel de Ville, where one doesn’t think of the Middle Ages, for in it is a figure of a weeping woman, and on the statue’s base are inscribed the names of young men fallen in 1870. Life becomes suddenly without reason.

At the station. _L’abri de bombardement pour permissionnaires_ is in an old convent having a deep cellar, across the railway. We carry our own luggage, resembling almost any _poilu_, and with grateful hearts think of what we left behind.

Mont-sur-Meurthe. Flooding sun, many soldiers, no room in the train. The famous and now classic refrain, “_Faut pas s’en paire_,”[19] floats about and makes one think how those who wait also serve, and in waiting learn patience, this new virtue of the Gaul. In regard to virtues, the French seem to have all those we thought they had, in addition to others we never suspected them of having.

A man completely bent with grief follows two men carrying a coffin. He himself carries a huge bead wreath, and his head is bared. Whatever his sorrow, it is gone out into the eternal, the immeasurable Wisdom, which I thought, in sudden fear, completely conceals that which it receives.

Dombasle, with its busy station and its great munitions-factories. Columns of smoke, from purest white to darkest brown, were rising to the shining heavens, and women in trousers, mothers and mothers-to-be, were going to work in the factories.

At Rosières immense camouflage works, and then the railway skirts the great canal. A thin, heavy-haired, very young girl is drawing a huge canal-boat. Her arms are crossed over her breast; above them is the broad band by which she tows that behemoth, a thousand times her size. In accord with some law of matter it is just possible. One thinks of the building of the Pyramids, and of the unborn.

NANCY, _1.15_.

Lunching at the Café Stanislas and eating my fifth macaroon, “for remembrance.” The gold guipure of the wrought-iron work makes the square seem to me like some lovely handkerchief thrown down as a challenge to memory. And I will _not_ forget.

_Later._

At the station, waiting for the train to pull out. An old man attended to our luggage; he liked his tip and became talkative as he straightened our impedimenta in the racks. Three sons killed in the war. Two at Verdun, the last and youngest at the Chemin des Dames this summer. His toothless old mouth trembled, and I thought to myself in sudden horror, “God, is _this_ France?”

LIVERDUN, _3 o’clock_.

A vision of transfigured beauty in the afternoon light. Its high promontory aglow, every window a-dazzle. Its ancient walls, its old château, its church, all seemingly made of something pink, unsubstantial, shining. At the foot of the town flows the Moselle and there is a second shining moiré ribbon—the great canal leading from the Marne to the Rhine.

Toul. The gorgeous towers of the cathedral are a-shine, too, above the outline of the great barrack buildings. The vast station is a sea of blue-clad washing in and out of trains.

At Pagny we pick up the Meuse, _la Meuse aux lignes nonchalantes_.

At Sorcy, wide, shallow expanses of inundation, and reeds and trees grow out of shining spaces, and meadow-bounded flat horizons stretch away, and suddenly it seems Oriental, Japanese, in the pink light—what you will—anything but a historic river of the European war, flowing through the elegant and sorrowful Lorraine.

And then we find ourselves at Gondrecourt in the tip of the acute angle, for still, to go the straight road between Nancy and Châlons, we would have to pass Commercy, daily bombarded by big German guns.

At Gondrecourt, about a dozen American soldiers standing on the platform, several seeming to have just left their mothers’ knees. We wanted to speak to the nearest one, but feared we might represent _l’autre danger_. Great packing-boxes piled everywhere with “U.S. Army” stamped on them—and how fateful a destination is this little Lorraine town!

At Demanges-aux-Eaux more Americans. An old church, quite mauve, rises up seemingly from bronze waters, the houses of the surrounding village, blue and gray. Americans are billeted in these wide-doored Lorraine peasant houses, or in big stables whose entrances are high enough for great hay-wagons to pass through.

A talkative military person in the compartment with us. I thought at first he was a secret agent, he seemed to know so little about the country; then I realized that he was only rather stupid. And he had an uncontrollable provincial curiosity about small things, and was quite _intrigué_ about his traveling companions, who seemed to know all the things he didn’t know. He was _en permission_, coming from the forest of Parroy, the other side of Lunéville, where the French and Germans sit within a few yards of each other. He was quite uninteresting about it all, but it wasn’t his fault, merely the way he was made. He showed me his map and the zigzagging German and French lines in the forest, and then I got suddenly bored and stood in the corridor, and watched the Meuse get pink and then purple and then a strange glinting black. Down the streets of little villages would come blue-clad men, smoking and talking, or getting water and stores for evening meals. And then the sun disappeared behind the yellow poplars, and a cold, clear night began to fall. Bridges were guarded by sentries with bayoneted rifles, and old men and women and children came in from dim beet-root fields, and more khaki-clad Americans were standing about village streets, or cycling in the dusk, behind reeds in water, and there were deepening forests, and black ridges against the last pale lemon glow, and then another little town, Laneuville, and two American patrols marching up and down with rifle on shoulder.

And the talkative officer, who had bought newspapers at Gondrecourt, tells of the pretty spy dancer, Mata Hari, shot that morning in the prison of Vincennes with warning pomp and circumstance, and of Bolo Pasha and _l’affaire Turmel_, but as soon as he touches a subject it loses all vestige of human interest.

“_Ce que nous avons vu d’Anglais parterre à Combes_,” or, “_Qu’il faisait froid la nuit où nous cédions la ligne aux Anglais_,” or, “_Je suis toujours là où on cède la ligne_, they say now the Americans will take the line at Parroy.”

He has been through the whole war without a scratch—Verdun, the Somme, the Aisne—and now he spends cold, dark nights listening for Germans in the forest of Parroy, and it hasn’t helped a bit; and he is one that will get through, when so much of wise and fair will have been gathered to the Lord. In an unwonted pause I asked him what he was in civil life, and he answered, “_Fabricant de brosses à dent_.” I know it’s all right, and there must be tooth-brushes, but we had just come from gallooned generals, prefects, mayors, smart young aviators, and men living in the world of books.

Blue mists came up from the meadows and slipped between the hills, and everywhere black trees grew out of gold water.

LIGNY-EN-BARROIS.

The end of our line at the north, and there is a Gothic church of the thirteenth century called Notre Dame des Vertus, and in it is the tomb of the Maréchale de Luxembourg, dead in 1695.

NANÇOIS-TRONVILLE.

More blue meadow mists along gold waters, and soft dark fringes of willows.

LONGEVILLE.

The evening star and spirals of smoke from little houses, and blue-clad men melting into the twilight, and the canal a golden band, with stampings of deepest purple where tree shadows cut across it. Two American soldiers standing at a road-crossing looking up at the sign-post. Everywhere the Lorraine twilight is shot with khaki-colored threads from over the seas—and the three gray sisters spin the inexorable web.

Bar-le-Duc, looking sick and sorry for itself. Station full of broken glass, dirt, and piles of demolished masonry. The evening star hangs above the older town on the hill. No time to get out to see how the canteen work is going on; but two obliging station employees gave me news. A whole quarter of the town by the river, near the Hôtel du Commerce et de Metz, of unsanctified memory, was destroyed ten days ago, by an air raid.

I asked if anything had happened to the church of St.-Peter, for I thought of the _chef-d’œuvre_ of Ligier Richier, René de Châlons,[20] standing in its dim space, holding his heart aloft in his left hand, eternal offering to his first wife, Louise of Lorraine. How his widow, Philippe de Gueldre, felt about this before she was laid out in the garb of the Poor Clares I don’t know.

No longer any night work in the canteen, no lights being permitted. Our train unlighted, too. New and larger signs indicating cellars and shelters everywhere. Black moving shapes of _camions_ along the road, and the evening star following us along the top of the hill of Bar. A squad of Annamites quitting their work on the road.

_En ces armées singulières_ _Où l’Annam casse des pierres_ _Sur la route de Verdun._

REVIGNY.

Portentous dark shapes of roofless houses and detachments of blue-clad men going down a winding road, one with the blue twilight. The station dim, the town completely dark, and the vine-planted hills only soft masses; the evening star still following us, though she is so close to the ridge that in a few minutes she will drop behind it. Oh, this passing of the evening star in a war—autumn behind French hills!

VITRY-LE-FRANÇOIS, _5.45_.

Founded by François Premier near the old town which was burned with its church full of worshipers, in a fit of anger by Louis VII during his war with the Count of Champagne. To expiate this crime he undertook the Second Crusade. Much black ribbon of canal knotted about, one end of which leads from the heart of France to the Rhine. An endless train of troops going to the front, men pressed together, sardine- and herring-like, in each compartment—it made my soul sick—just human masses weighed down by accoutrement and literally wedged in. A lively dispute between a thick-set _poilu_ and one of the station employees on behalf of a slight, blond, very young soldier.

“_Quoi, vous osez engueuler un poilu de quinze ans?_”

And the following crescendo mounts to the broken panes of the station roof, “_Embusqué, cochon, salaud, vache!_”[21]

There was no answer of protest from the official. And Vitry-le-François is where Napoleon almost took prisoner the Emperor of Russia, the King of Prussia, and the Austrian General Schwarzenberg in 1814, and in 1914 it was bombarded by the Germans, and now American troops pour through it.