Such was the way that Pont-à-Mousson did not become Mussenbruck. The episode is an agreeable interlude of decency in the history of German occupations, for that atrocities were perpetrated in Nomény, just across the river, is beyond question. I have talked with survivors. At Pont-à-Mousson everything was orderly; six miles to the east, houses were burned over the heads of the inhabitants, and women and children brutally massacred.
I best remember the little city as it was one afternoon in early December. The population of 17,000 had then shrunk to about 900, and only a little furtive life lingered in the town. My promenade began at the river-bank by the wooden footbridge crossing from the shore to the remaining arches of the graceful eighteenth-century stone bridge blown up in September, 1914. There is always something melancholy about a ruined bridge, perhaps because the structure symbolizes a patient human victory over the material world. There was something intensely tragic in the view of the wrecked quarter of Saint-Martin, seen across the deep, greenish, wintry river, and in the great curve of the broad flood sullenly hurrying to Metz. At the end of the bridge, ancient and gray, rose the two round towers of the fifteenth-century parish church, with that blind, solemn look to them the towers of Notre Dame possess, and beyond this edifice, a tile-roofed town and the great triangular hill called the Mousson. It was dangerous to cross the bridge, because German snipers occasionally fired at it, so I contented myself with looking down the river. Beyond the Bois-le-Prêtre, the next ridge to rise from the river was a grassy spur bearing the village of Norroy on its back. You could see the hill, only four kilomètres away, the brown walls of the village, the red roofs, and sometimes the glint of sunlight on a window; but for us the village might have been on another planet. All social and economic relations with Norroy had ceased since September, 1914, and reflecting on this fact, the invisible wall of the trenches became more than a mere military wall, became a barrier to every human relation and peaceful tie.
A sentry stood by the ruined bridge, a small, well-knit man with beautiful silver-gray hair, blue eyes, and pink cheeks; his uniform was exceptionally clean, and he appeared to be some decent burgher torn from his customary life. I fell into conversation with him. He recollected that his father, a veteran of 1870, had prophesied the present war.
"'We shall see them again, the spiked helmets (les casques à pointe),' said my father—'we shall see them again.'
"'Why?' I asked him.
"'Because they have eaten of us, and will be hungry once more.'"
The principal street of the town led from this bridge to a great square, and continued straight on toward Maidières and Montauville. The sidewalks around this square were in arcades under the houses, for the second story of every building projected for seven or eight feet over the first and rested on a line of arches at the edge of the street. To avoid damage from shells bursting in the open space, every one of these arcades, and there were perhaps a hundred all told, had been plugged with sandbags, so that the square had an odd, blind look. A little life flickered in the damp, dark alleys behind these obstructions. There was a tobacco shop, kept by two pretty young women whom the younger soldiers were always jollying, a wineshop, a tailorshop, and a bookstore, always well supplied with the great Parisian weeklies, which one found later in odd corners of shelters in the trenches. Occasionally a soldier bought a serious book when it was to be found in the dusty files of the "Collection Nelson"; I remember seeing a young lieutenant of artillery buying Ségur's "Histoire de la Grande Armée en 1812," and another taking Flaubert's "Un cœur simple." But the military life, roughly lived, and shared with simple people, appears to make even the wisest boyish, and after a while at the front the intellect will not read anything intellectual. It simply won't, perhaps because it can't. The soldier mind delights in rough, genial, and simple jokes. A sergeant, whom I knew to be a distinguished young scholar in civilian life, was always throwing messages wrapped round a stone into the German trenches; the messages were killingly funny, amiably indecent, and very jejune. Invariably they provoked a storm of grenades, and sometimes epistles in the same vein from the Boches. In spite of the vicious pang of the grenades, there was an absurd "Boys-will-be-boys" air to the whole performance. Conversation, however, did not sink to this boyish level, and the rag-tag and bob-tail of one's cultivation found its outlet in speech.
At the end of this street was the railroad crossing, the passage à niveau, and the station in a jungle of dead grass and brambles. Like the bridge, its rustiness and weediness was a dreadful symbol of the cessation of human activity, and the blue enamel signpost lettered in white with the legend, "Metz—32 kilomètres," was another reminder of the town to which the French aspired with all the fierce intensity of crusaders longing for Jerusalem. It was impossible to get away from the omnipresence of the name of the fated city—it stared at you from obscure street corners, and was to be found on the covers of printed books and post-cards. I saw the city once from the top of the hill of the Mousson; its cathedral towers pierced the blue mists of the brown moorlands, and it appeared phantasmal and tremendously distant. Yet for those towers countless men had died, were dying, would die. A French soldier who had made the ascent with me pointed out Metz the much desired.
"Are you going to get it?" I asked. "Perhaps so," he replied gravely. "After so many sacrifices." (Après tant de sacrifices.) He made no gesture, but I know that his vision included the soldiers' cemetery at the foot of the Mousson hill. It lay, a rust-colored field, on the steep hillside just at the border of the town, and was new, raw, and dreadful. The guardian of the cemetery, an old veteran of 1870, once took me through the place. He was a very lean, hooped-over old man with a big, aquiline nose, blue-gray eyes framed in red lids, and a huge, yellowish-white mustache. First he showed me the hideous picture of the civilian cemetery, in which giant shells had torn open the tombs, hurled great sarcophagi a distance of fifty feet, and dug craters in the rows of graves. Though the civilian authorities had done what they could to put the place in order, there were still memories of the disturbed dead to whom the war had denied rest. Coming to the military cemetery, the guardian whispered, pointing to the new mounds with his rustic cane, "I have two colonels, three commandants, and a captain. Yes, two colonels" (deux colonels). Following his staff, my eye looked at the graves as if it expected to see the living men or their effigies. Somewhat apart lay another grave. "Voilà un colonel boche," said the sexton; "and a lieutenant boche—and fifty soldats boches."
The destroyed quarter of Pont-à-Mousson lay between the main street and the flank of the Bois-le-Prêtre. The quarter was almost totally deserted, probably not more than ten houses being inhabited out of several thousand. The streets that led into it had grass growing high in the gutters, and a velvety moss wearing a winter rustiness grew packed between the paving-stones. Beyond the main street, la rue Fabvrier went straight down this loneliness, and halted or turned at a clump of wrecked houses a quarter of a mile away. Over this clump, slately-purple and cold, appeared the Bois-le-Prêtre, and every once in a while a puffy cloud of greenish-brown or gray-black would float solemnly over the crests of the trees. This stretch of la rue Fabvrier was one of the most melancholy pictures it was possible to see. Hardly a house had been spared by the German shells; there were pock-marks and pits of shell fragments in the plaster, window glass outside, and holes in walls and roofs. I wandered down the street, passing the famous miraculous statue of the Virgin of Pont-à-Mousson. The image, only a foot or two high and quite devoid of facial expression, managed somehow to express emotion in the outstretched arms, drooping in a gesture at once of invitation and acceptance. A shell had maculated the wall on each side and above the statue, but the little niche and canopy were quite untouched. The heavy sound of my soldier boots went dump! clump! down the silence.