"Then we are going for certain?"
"We are sent for. Yes, we are going. We are to be attached to the Headquarters Staff. Petain is there. It might even be gay."
f.a.n.n.y laughed. "Gay!"
"Why not?"
"I was thinking of my one pair of silk stockings."
"You have silk stockings with you!"
"Yes, I ... I am equipped for anything."
There came a morning, as wet and sad as any other, when Stewart and f.a.n.n.y, seated in the back of an ambulance, their feet overhanging the edge, watched the black hut dwindle upon the road, and wondered how any one had lived there so long.
PART II
LORRAINE
CHAPTER II
METZ
With its back to the woods and hills of Luxembourg, with its face to the desolation of Northern France, the city of Metz stood at the entry of Lorraine like the gate to a new world.
The traveller, arriving after long hours of journey through the battlefields, might sigh with relief, gape with pleasure, then hurry away down deflagged streets, beneath houses roped with green-leafed garlands, to eat divinely at Moitrier"s restaurant, and join the dancing in the hall below.
Not a night pa.s.sed in Metz without the beat of music upon the frosty air. It burst into the narrow streets from _estaminets_ where the soldiers danced, from halls, from drawing-rooms of confiscated German houses where officers of the "Grand Quartier General" danced a triumph.
Or it might be supposed to be a triumph by the Germans who stayed in their homes after dark. They might suppose that the French officers danced for happiness, that they danced because they were French, because they were victorious, because they were young, because they must.
It was not, surely, the wild dancing of the host whose party drags a little, who calls for more champagne, more fiddles?
In the centre of the city of Metz sat the Marechal Petain, and kept his eye upon Lorraine. He was not a man who cared for gaiety, but should the Lorraines be insufficiently amused he gave them b.a.l.l.s--insufficiently fed, he sent for flour and sugar; all the flour and sugar that France could spare; more, much more, than Paris had, and at his bidding the cake-shops flowered with _eclairs, millefeuilles, brioches, choux a la creme_, and cakes more marvellous with German names.
France, poor and hungry, flung all she had into Alsace and Lorraine, that she might make her entry with the a.s.suring dazzle of the benefactress. The Lorraines, like children, were fed with sugar while the meat shops were empty--were kept dancing in national costume that they might forget to ask for leather boots, to wonder where wool and silk were hiding.
Fetes were organised, colours were paraded in the square, torchlight processions were started on Sat.u.r.day nights, when the boys of the town went crying and whooping behind the march of the flares. Artists were sent for from Paris, took train to Nancy, and were driven laboriously through hours of snow, over miles of sh.e.l.l-pitted roads, that they might sing and play in the theatre or in the house of the Governor. To the dances, to the dinners, to the plays came the Lorraine women, wearing white cotton stockings to set off their thick ankles, and dancing in figures and set dances unknown to the officers from Paris.
The Commandant Dormans, head of all motor transport under the Grand Quartier General, having prepared his German drawing-room as a ballroom, having danced all the evening with ladies from the surrounding hills, found himself fatigued and exasperated by the side of the head of Foreign Units attached to the Automobile Service.
"I thought you had Englishwomen at Bar-le-Duc," he said to the latter.
"I have--eight."
"What are they doing at Bar-le-Duc? Get them here."
"Is there work, sir?"
"Work! They shall work from dawn to sunset so long as they will dance all night! Englishwomen do dance, don"t they?"
"I have never been to England."
"Get them here. Send for them."
So through his whim it happened that six days later a little caravan of women crossed the old front lines beyond Pont-a-Mousson as dusk was falling, and as dark was falling entered the gates of Metz.
They leant from the ambulance excitedly as the lights of the streets flashed past them, saw windows piled with pale bricks of b.u.t.ter, bars of chocolates, tins of preserved strawberries, and jams.
"Can you see the price on the b.u.t.ter?"
"Twenty-four...."
"What?"
"I can"t see. Yes.... Twenty-four francs a pound."
"Good heavens!"
"Ah, is it possible, eclairs?"
"Eclairs!"
And with exclamations of awe they saw the cake shops in the Serpenoise.
German boys cried "American girls! American girls!" and threw paper b.a.l.l.s into the back of the ambulance.
"I heard, I heard...."
"What is it?"
"I heard German spoken."
"Did you think, then, they were all dead?"
"No," but f.a.n.n.y felt like some old scholar who hears a dead language spoken in a vanished town.
They drove on past the Cathedral into the open square of the Place du Theatre. Half the old French theatre had been set aside as offices for the Automobile Service, and now the officers of the service, who had waited for them with curiosity, greeted them on the steps.
"You must be tired, you must be hungry! Leave the ambulance where it is and come now, as you are, to dine with us!"
In the uncertain light from the lamp on the theatre steps the French tried to see the English faces, the women glanced at the men, and they walked together to the oak-panelled Mess Room in a house on the other side of the empty square. A long table was spread with a white cloth, with silver, with flowers, as though they were expected. Soldiers waited behind the chairs.
"Vauclin! That _foie gras_ you brought back from Paris yesterday...