The Happy Foreigner | Page 7

to sew on a button, sell them an egg, boys of nineteen and twenty, fair, tall, and good-looking.
"We shall be glad when they are gone," said the old woman looking at their gay faces. "They are children," she added, "with the faults of children."
"They seem well-mannered."
"They are beautiful boys," said the peasant woman, "and good-mannered. But I'm tired of them. Children are all very well, but to have your house full of them, your village, your family-life! They play all day in the street, chasing the dogs, throwing balls. When our children come out of school there's no holding them, they must be off playing with the Americans. The war is over. Why don't they take them home?"
"Good-day, ma'am," said a tall boy, coming up to Fanny. "You're sure cold. We brought you this." And he offered her a cup of coffee he had fetched from his canteen.
"Yes, they're good boys," said the old woman, "but one doesn't want other people's children always in one's life."
"Is this a park?" Fanny asked a soldier in the next village, a village whose four streets were filled with rows of lorries, touring cars and ambulances. On every car the iron was frail with rust, the bonnets of some were torn off, a wheel, two wheels, were missing, the side ripped open disclosing the rusting bones.
"Pardon, madame?"
"What are you doing here?"
"We are left behind from the Fourth Army which has gone up to Germany. I have no tools or I would make one car out of four. But my men are discouraged and no one works. The war is over.
"Then this is a park?"
"No, madame, it is a cemetery."
Months went by, and there came a night, as wet and sad as any other, when no premonitory star showed in the sky, and all that was bright in Fanny's spirit toned itself to match the monotonous, shadowless pallor about her.
She was upon her homeward journey. At the entrance to the hut she paused; for such a light was burning in the sitting-room that it travelled even the dark corridor and wandered out upon the step. By it she could see the beaded moisture of the rain-mist upon the long hair escaped from her cap.
A group of women stood within, their faces turned towards the door as she entered.
"Fanny...."
"What is it?"
"We are going to Metz! We are ordered to Metz!" Stewart waved a letter.
Was poverty and solitude at an end? They did not know it. In leaving the Meuse district did they leave, too, the boundless rain, the swollen rivers, the shining swamps, the mud which ebbed and flowed upon the land like a tide? Was hunger at an end, discomfort, and poor living? They had no inkling.
Fanny, indifferent to any change, hoping for nothing better, turned first to the meat tin, for she was hungry.
"Metz is a town," she hazarded.
"Of course!"
"There will be things to eat there?"
"No, very little. It was fed from Germany; now that it is suddenly fed from Paris the service is disorganised. One train crosses the devastated land in the day. I hear all this from the brigadier--who has, for that matter, never been there."
"Then we are going for certain?"
"We are sent for. Yes, we are going. We are to be attached to the Headquarters Staff. Pétain is there. It might even be gay."
Fanny 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 Fanny, 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 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