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 passed 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 Général" 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 Maréchal Pétain, 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 balls—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 éclairs, millefeuilles, brioches, choux à la crême, 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 assuring 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.
Fêtes were organised, colours were paraded in the square, torchlight processions were started on Saturday 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 shell-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 Général, 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."