The Happy Foreigner | Page 8

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."
"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-à-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 butter, bars of chocolates, tins of preserved strawberries, and jams.
"Can you see the price on the butter?"
"Twenty-four...."
"What?"
"I can't see. Yes.... Twenty-four francs a pound."
"Good heavens!"
"Ah, is it possible, éclairs?"
"Eclairs!"
And with exclamations of awe they saw the cake shops in the Serpenoise.
German boys cried "American girls! American girls!" and threw paper balls 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 Fanny 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... where is it, out with it? What, you only brought two jars! Arrelles, there's a jar left from yours."
"Mademoiselle, sit here by Captain Vauclin. He will amuse you. And you, mademoiselle, by me. You all talk French?"
"And fancy, I never met an Englishwoman before. Never! Your responsibility is terrible. How tired you must be!... What a journey! For to-night we have found you billets. We billet you on Germans. It is more comfortable; they do more for you. What, you have met no Germans yet? They exist, yes, they exist."
"Arrelles, you are not talking French! You should talk English. You can't? Nor I either...."
"But these ladies talk French marvellously...."
Some one in another house was playing an ancient instrument. Its music stole across the open square. Soldiers passed singing in the street.
A hundred miles ... a hundred years away ... lay Bar-le-Duc, liquid in mud, soaked