The wounded men sitting or lying on hay in the grain-carts at the hospital door looked up as the Great Headquarter Staff rode by and gave a shaky Hoch! of greeting. Heads of dressers, nurses, Knights of St. John, and surgeons appeared at windows from which projected the Flag with the Red Cross. While a long train of haggard French prisoners, halted before the porch of the church that had been converted into a temporary prison, stared with lackluster eyes over the bowls of cabbage-soup and the huge hunches of bread that had been distributed among them by pitying ladies; and a battalion of little black-a-vised, green-coated Saxon soldiers who had marched in dead-beat and were dozing on straw under the Market Hall, lifted their heads from their knapsacks, saying: "There goes Moltke with his King, and the Big Pomeranian. Something is up out yonder!" and rolled over to sleep again....
The inhabitants and tradespeople of Pont à Mousson were too crushed to make any audible comments. Within a fortnight they had had twice to feed and quarter a French Division. Now here, as it seemed, was the whole Prussian Army poured out upon them.
They were dumb and stupefied in the Babel of foreign dialects. They could make no headway against the flood. Everywhere were loud-voiced Intendants making requisitions and giving orders; officers and quartermaster-sergeants shouting for rooms, provender and stabling; the men, like the officers, insatiable in demands for meat, bread, forage, tobacco, flour and wine, liberal in oaths and blows to those who could not satisfy their needs.
Tradesmen in gutted shops swore in whispers over basketsful of dirty little nickel coins with (to them) indecipherable inscriptions—all they had to show in return for one or two thousand francs' worth of stock. To grumble brought retribution, swift, sharp and merciless, on the head of the grumbler. To resist meant death. Therefore they would be silent until the invader should have passed on.
But when the wearers of the muddy blue uniforms and the riders of the muddy, well-fed horses did pass, fresh hosts came swarming after them. There seemed no end to the brown-faced men in the loathed blue uniform....
"Are there more to come?" those of them who understood French—and many did—were asked timidly, and they answered: "Naturally. We are only the Advance. To keep the roads by which we have passed open, and to guard the telegraph-wires we have left behind us there will be very many more required!"
Germany was being emptied into France's lap, it seemed to the bewildered peasants leaning against the walls of their cottages or peering from the doorways, as had done the peasants of Alsace-Lorraine. They, like them, were ruined, their crops devastated by cataclysms of armed humanity, their cellars emptied, their frugal stores devoured.
"But where are we to find food for all these, we who had fared badly enough before they came? And who will pay us for what they have not paid for, or give cash for this stuff called money that they have left behind? Will it be the King or the Emperor?" some haggard man or woman, reckless with despair and misery, would demand with frantic gestures. "And how shall we feed our children when they leave us nothing? How live at all when they live upon us?"
They asked this less often when the Flag with the Geneva Cross appeared above roofs and thrust out of windows of buildings appropriated as hospitals, and when long trains of German ambulance-wagons and hay-carts full of wounded men in blue uniforms began to pass by, as well as piteous processions of French wounded and French prisoners....
"You see, they die!" they presently began to tell each other. "Frenchmen are being killed like flies out yonder where you hear the cannon, but not Frenchmen only. These too, die.... MacMahon has failed us and the cursed Emperor has run away for fear of Bismarck, and Bazaine may prove a rotten staff for France to lean on. But if our generals have forgotten how to lead, the Army of France has not forgotten how to fight, and thousands upon thousands of Prussians have been killed since the beginning of the War. They dig their great trenches so quickly and bury the slain in such haste that the greatness of their losses will never be really known. When they would hide them more completely, they heap up corpses in farmers' barns, and pile the farmers' straw and hay and faggots about them, and pour on petroleum and tar and set fire to it—and thus their dead are consumed to ashes—and sometimes the yet living with the dead!"