The Happy Foreigner | Page 8

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 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